‘What is the cause of thunder?’ A Study of the Storm in King Lear

by Jennifer Mae Hamilton

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of Arts and Media Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University of New South Wales

5 October 2012

ii Abstract

This thesis offers a new interpretation of the storm in King Lear. The overarching argument is that when the storm’s material presence in the drama and its cosmological implications are given due consideration, both the play’s critical and performance history and the text itself are meaningfully complicated. From this perspective, this thesis unearths an important historical shift in interpretation: in 1606, the storm was a radical meteorological event that broke with conventional representations of the weather and challenged the perceived relations between the heavens and the earth. By means of a complex confluence of historical forces, it is now considered a symbolic adjunct to an entirely human conflict. Through a review of the play’s critical and theatrical history alongside a close reading of the text, this thesis approaches King Lear from a transhistorical perspective in order to investigate the marked change in the significance of the storm and reanimate its material function in the drama for today.

Part One maps changes in the meaning and representation of the storm between 1606 and 2012 with regard to the cultural and cosmological significance of the weather, as well as artistic tastes and practices, in order to assess changes to the representation and interpretation of the storm on stage. Drawing on the notion that the storm is a structurally integral meteorological event, Part Two offers a reading of the storm’s material role in both the eponymous character’s journey and in the overall drama. The storm is shown not to be a symbol of Lear's emotions or mental state; instead, Lear's willing and shameless exposure of his mortal 'body natural' to the meteorological storm facilitates his famous paroxysm. By demonstrating the storm’s structural centrality to the drama, Part Two also argues that its role in triggering a crisis in the kingdom is akin to a ‘natural disaster’. By revitalising the storm’s significance as a meteorological event and rethinking the meaning of Lear’s important question – ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ – this thesis addresses an intriguing gap in Shakespeare scholarship at a time in history where the causes of thunder are being questioned once more.

ii Acknowledgements

This thesis would not have been possible without the professional, intellectual, financial and emotional support of a range of different individuals, groups, institutions and organisations. I want to take the opportunity to thank them all here. First and foremost, I need to thank my supervisor, who unfortunately did not survive to see the completion of this project. The late Associate Professor Richard Madelaine: thank you. You politely forced me to take the path of least resistance on this journey into the messy history of King Lear. I respect your scholarly rigour, your relentless questioning and dogged attachment to the theatricality of Shakespeare’s work; without this, my thesis would not be what it is today. Secondly, I would like to thank my co-supervisor, Dr Meg Mumford, who stepped in after Richard’s passing and helped me to completion. Her fresh eyes, careful reading and provocative questions came at an integral stage of the process. Also, thank you to my proof reader, Dr John Golder.

I gave several work-in-progress presentations of this research that were integral in shaping and refining my argument; I need to thank those who took time out to involve themselves in my work. Firstly, thanks to the staff from the Department of English at the University of New South Wales who attended my major seminar presentation. I thank them for their interest in my topic despite discursive differences and their energetic and erratic challenges to my thesis. Secondly, Dr Liam Semler and the members of the Early Modern Literature and Culture group at the University of Sydney for welcoming me into the fold and giving me timely feedback on my first chapter in the final stages of this thesis. Thirdly, I would like to thank the members of EASLCE and ASLE-UK who attended my presentations in Bath (UK) and Antalya (Turkey), their attention to the environmental and non-human dimensions of the text proved to be a source of encouragement on this unconventional path.

I would like to thank the staff of several archives where I spent countless hours researching for the middle chapters of the thesis. Thanks to Christian from the Bell Shakespeare Company, Cheryl from the Max Reinhardt Collection and Madeleine from the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford-Upon-Avon. I would also like to thank Craig Martin, who generously sent me the final proofs of Renaissance Meteorology before it was published and whose work enriched the historical complexity of important parts of my argument at a late stage. I would also like to thank the director Benedict Andrews and the actor Greg Hicks for their insider comments on my work along the way.

My travel and research was funded by a series of bursaries from both ASLE-UK, the Graduate Research School of UNSW and also a special prize from the UNSW research centre. I would like to thank these organisations for their financial support, which enabled me to pursue this project.

I also wish to thank my peers, colleagues and friends, who have supported me personally throughout what has been a difficult time of life. Dr Carl Power bore the brunt of the emotional, psychological and physiological challenge that is involved in spending four years out in Lear’s storm; his ongoing commentary on the thesis, his insistence on the value of brevity and his pursuit of clear expression of complex ideas is part of the fabric of this work, and it is with much love and respect that I record my thanks today. Drs Demelza Marlin, Michelle Jameison, Laura Joseph and Kate Livett and Ms Viv McGregor have all influenced my work in powerful ways over the years

iii and for that I thank them. Also, people who supported my ideas in other ways or enabled me to pursue other dimensions of my work in a more creative or experimental context I thank you: Daniel Brine, Bec Dean, Nat Randall, Bruce Cherry, Teik Kim-Pok and Emma Ramsay (from Performance Space) Astrid Lorange and Aden Rolfe (from Critical Animals) Leland Kean and Lucinda Gleeson (from the Tamarama Rock Surfers Theatre Company) and Kate Blackmore, Frances Barrett, Pia Van Gelder, Tom Smith and Marian Tubbs (from Serial Space). I would also like to thank my bike for helping me to get to and from the office each day. Although it might seem strange to thank a machine amidst a list of people, my bike occupies an important place in my life. The energy, strength and vitality generated through my relationship with my bike made the process of researching, writing, editing and refining this thesis physically possible.

Finally I would like to thank my family. To my mother, Maggie Hamilton: thanks for your ongoing love and friendship and your energetic and passionate nature. This has kept me strong throughout the course of this project and enabled me to stay on track despite the adversity. Also thank you for all the dinners, breakfasts and lunches you cooked me when I came to visit and work towards the end of this project. To my father, JJ Hamilton, who died during the course of writing the thesis. Dad was not a Lear-like father; in fact he demanded very little from me and used to take me out walking in storms. I wish he could see the completion because he was the one who encouraged me to love storms, to dance wildly in the mud and celebrate the majesty of wild weather. Thanks to my maternal grandmother, May Schubert, who also died during the course of this thesis just shy of one hundred. She was the matriarch in my life; she gave love generously albeit conditionally, and constantly kept me on my toes. Thanks also to my cousin, Rebecca Hamilton, whose work as a scholar, activist and journalist is a constant source of inspiration. And finally, I am overjoyed to thank my one big love, Craig Johnson, who I met during this project. I never thought I would have the privilege of being so thoroughly enriched by love, let alone find it while surrounded by the death and detritus of a thesis project on King Lear. I thank you CMJ, for being you, for helping me through the end of this process and for so lovingly opening your life up to me. I am excited to share the future with you.

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This thesis is dedicated to the memory of my Supervisor, Associate Professor Richard Madelaine (1947-2012), my maternal Grandmother May Schubert (1910-2010) and the man who encouraged me not to be afraid of storms, my dear Father John James Hamilton (1941-2009).

Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither; Ripeness is all (5.2.9-11).

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Contents

Introduction ………………………………………………………………………. 1 The Distinction Between the Storm and Lear’s Mind

Part 1: A Historical Overview of the Storm

Chapter 1 …………………………………………………………………………. 20 A Cosmological Cataclysm: Early Modern Meteorology, Dramatic Weather and King Lear’s Idiosyncratic Storm

1.1. Aristotelian Meteorology 1.2. Dramatic Meteorology 1.3. The ‘Storm and tempest’ in King Lear 1.4. The Purpose of the Storm 1.5. Shakespeare’s Idiosyncratic Storm 1.6. The Storm Scenes as a Representation of the Cosmic Paradigm Shift 1.7. The Changing Significance of the Storm

Chapter 2 ………………………………………………………………………… 80 The Meteorological Storm, 1606-1892: Theatre Technology, Populist Spectacles and Nahum Tate

2.1. Nahum Tate’s Storm 2.2. The Jacobean Storm 2.3. The Restoration Storm 2.4. The Enlightenment Storm 2.5. The Restoration of Shakespeare’s Storm on the Victorian Stage 2.6. The End of the Meteorological Storm 2.7. Conclusion

Chapter 3 ……………………………………………………………………….. 130 The Modern Storm, 1908-2011: Making Sense of the Storm in an Infinite Cosmos

3.1. The Symbolic Storm 3.2. The Storm as Chorus 3.3. New Cosmic Storms 3.4. Making Sense of the Storm in an Infinite Cosmos 3.5. Conclusion

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Part 2: A New Interpretation of the Storm

Chapter 4 ……………………………………………………………………….. 174 Rethinking Lear in the Storm: Shame, Mortality and the King’s ‘Body Natural’

4.1. ‘Off, off, you lendings’ 4.2. What Happens During the Storm? 4.3. Lear’s Shame 4.4. From Shameful Self-Consciousness to Shameless Self-Revelation 4.5. Ashamed Characters, Ashamed Critics 4.6. Conclusion

Chapter 5 ……………………………………………………………………….. 220 ‘This pitiless storm’: King Lear as a Natural Disaster

5.1. Linking the Socio-Political Drama to the Storm 5.2. Where is the Storm? 5.3. Gloucester in the Storm 5.4. A Natural Disaster in the Kingdom 5.5. Conclusion

Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………… 246 • The Study of the Storm in King Lear • A New Vision for King Lear • Towards Ecocritical Literary Historicism

Works Consulted ………………………………………………………………. 260

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Illustration List

1. Joshua Reynolds, Study for King Lear, c.1770. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Retrieved from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Study_for_King_Lear_by_Joshua_Reynolds.j peg, 6 October 2010. 2. George Romney, Head of Lear, c.1773-1775. Chalk on paper. Folger Shakespeare Library Collection. Retrieved from http://www.folger.edu/, 6 October 2010. 3. James Barry, King Lear weeping over the dead body of Cordelia, c.1776-1778. Oil on Canvas. Tate Britain. Retrieved from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/barry-king- lear-weeping-over-the-dead-body-of-cordelia-t00556, 6 October 2010. 4. Leonard Digges, The Geocentric Cosmos, 1592. Illustration in L. Digges, A Prognostication eurlasting of right good effect, fruitfully augmented by the auctor, contayning plaine, brief, pleasaunt, chosen rules to judge the weather by the Sunne, Moone, Starres, Cometes, Rainebow, Thunder, Cloudes, with other extraordinary tokens, not omitting the Aspectes of Planetes, with a briefe judgement for euer, of Plenty, Lacke, Sickness, Dearth, Warres &c. opening also many natural causes worthy to bee knowen, London, 1592. Retrieved from Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyk.com, 14 September 2011. 5. Oronce Finé, Two representations of the Sublunary Spheres, 1532. Reprinted in S.K. Heninger, The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe, Huntington Library, San Marino, 1977, pp.32-3. 6. ‘The Sabbath’ from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493. Reprinted in S.K. Heninger, The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe, Huntington Library, San Marino, 1977, p.20. 7. Anonymous, The Last Tempestious Windes and Weather, 1613. Pamphlet Cover Retrieved from Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyk.com, 14 September, 2011. 8. William Shakespeare, The title page of the King Lear Quarto, 1608. Located in the British Library, C.34.k.17. Retrieved from http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/kinglear.html 6 February 2012. 9. Thomas Digges, The Heliocentric Cosmos. Reprinted in S.K. Heninger, The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe, Huntington Library, San Marino, 1977, p.50. 10. James McArdell, Mr Garrick in the character of King Lear, Act 3, scene 1, 1761. Mezzotint. Victoria and Albert Museum, 2010EG8640. Retrieved from http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1157982/print-mr-garrick-in-the-character/?print=1, 21 May 2012. 11. Edward Gordon Craig, The Storm in King Lear, 1920. Woodcut. Victoria and Albert Museum, E.1146-1924. Retrieved from http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O766388/print-the-storm-in-king-lear/ 6 February 2012. 12. Prompt copy, Act 3, scenes 1 and 2, König Lear, 1908. Directed by Max Reinhardt. Max Reinhardt Collection, Binghamton Library, New York. 13. Isamu Noguchi, Design model for Act 3, scene 4, 1955. Photograph reprinted in B. Rychlak, Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor’s World, Steidl, New York, 2004. Retrieved from, http://mondo-blogo.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/vintage-noguchi-in-color.html 7 April 2012. 14. Angus McBean, King Lear Act 1, scene 1. 1962 Royal Shakespeare Company Production, directed by Peter Brook. Photograph. Original image located in RSC Archives, Stratford-upon-Avon.

ix 15. Peter Brook, Lear and Gloucester on the beach in Peter Brook’s 1971 film. Film Still. Digital image captured from DVD. 16. Anonymous, Roger Blin as Hamm in the original Paris production of Beckett’s Endgame (or Fin de Partie), which Blin directed in 1957. Photograph. Retrieved from http://chagalov.tumblr.com/post/3286479136/roger-blin-as-hamm-in-fin-de-partie- endgame, 6 February 2012. 17. Anonymous, Act 1, scene 1 of Blin’s 1957 Paris production of Fin de Partie. Photograph. Retrieved from http://s.derbek.free.fr/beckett/Fin_De_Partie.jpg, 6 February 2012. 18. Angus McBean, Paul Scofield as King Lear. 1962 RSC Production. Photograph. Located in RSC Archives, Stratford-upon-Avon. 19. Prompt copy, Act 2, scene 2, King Lear, 1962. Directed by Peter Brook. Located in RSC Archives, Stratford-upon-Avon. 20. Manuel Harlan, Greg Hicks as King Lear. 2010 RSC production in Stratford-Upon- Avon. Digital Photograph. Retrieved from http://www.rsc.co.uk, 7 April 2011. 21. Eddi, Arnar Jónsson as King Lear. 2010 National Theatre of Iceland Production. Digital Photograph. Reykjavik Production. Retrieved from http://www.benedictandrews.com, 8 July 2011. 22. Johan, Persson, Derek Jacobi as King Lear. 2010 Donmar Warehouse Production. Digital Photograph. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/dec/08/review-king-lear-derek-jacobi, 7 April 2011. 23. Manuel Harlan, Greg Hicks as King Lear and Geoffrey Freshwater as Gloucester. 2010 RSC Production. Digital Photograph. Retrieved from http://www.rsc.co.uk, 7 April 2011. 24. George Hewitt Cushman, Mr. Edwin Forrest as King Lear. 1845 Touring Production. Photograph. Retrieved from http://luna.folger.edu/ 12 September 2012.

Note on the edition of King Lear used in the thesis and referencing style: Unless otherwise specified, references to Shakespeare’s plays are from Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, R. Proudfoot, A. Thompson & D. Scott Kastan (eds), Methuen, London, 2001.

This is a conflated edition of the 1608 Quarto and 1623 Folio. However, lines found in Folio but not in Quarto are marked with a superscript ‘F’ and those found in Quarto but not Folio with a superscript ‘Q’.

While the vast majority of my references are in footnotes, references to citations from Shakespeare’s plays are placed in the body of the text. I have kept those simple. For example, the reference for Kent’s remarks at lines 60-62 of Act 3, scene 2—‘Alack, bareheaded? / Gracious my lord, hard by here is a hovel: / Some friendship will it lend you ‘gainst the tempest’—would appear as (3.2.60-62). The symbol / indicates a break between two lines of verse.

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O, what a world’s convention of agonies is here! All external nature in a storm, all moral nature convulsed, – the real madness of Lear, the feigned madness of Edgar, the babbling of the Fool, the desperate fidelity of Kent – surely such a scene was never conceived before or since! Samuel Taylor Coleridge1

Fie on this storm. Shakespeare2

We are not free. And the sky can still fall in on our heads. Antonin Artaud3

1 S.T. Coleridge, ‘King Lear’ in J. Bate (ed.), The Romantics on Shakespeare, Penguin, London, 1992, p.393. 2 King Lear, 3.1.35. 3 A. Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, Grove Press, New York, 1958, p.79. xi Introduction The Distinction Between the Storm and Lear’s Mind

Shakespeare often made use of extreme weather in his plays, both as special effects and plot devices. Thunder and lightning underscore the evil machinations of the

Witches in Macbeth. Offstage thunder accompanies Cassius’s appeal to Caska (sic) to take part in the murder of Caesar: ‘Are you not moved, when all the sway of the earth /

Shakes like a thing unfirm?’ (1.3.3-4) in Julius Caesar. Sea storms play an important dramatic role between scenes in Pericles, during the opening scene of The Tempest, and prior to the opening of The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night. In each of these last three instances it is the sea storm that delivers the principal characters on to the stage and establishes the initial situation of the drama itself.

The storm in King Lear, however, differs from all these and very significantly so. Not only is it the longest meteorological event of its kind in the playwright’s oeuvre, it is central to the play’s structure, spanning eight scenes over Acts 2 and 3, three of which are played out ‘in the rain’ (3.1, 3.2 & 3.4) and another in which the King is sheltered in a hovel while the storm rages outside (3.6). It sits at the heart of

Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy while the king roams lunatic outdoors and his kingdom descends into war. These scenes incorporate key speeches in which the protagonist addresses the storm directly, reflects upon his exposure to the elements and questions the relationship between the weather and his situation.

Nowhere else does a Shakespearean protagonist question and challenge the nature and purpose of his place in the world as Lear does. Furthermore, however much characters might want the storm to correspond with their situation and their worldview, the storm is ultimately indifferent to human conflict and impervious to human desires.

In this respect, Shakespeare not only breaks his own rules with the storm in King Lear,

1 but he also departs from early modern convention in the representation of meteors. In other words, the storm in King Lear is not only centrally significant, but idiosyncratically so.

Paradoxically, despite the scale, duration, centrality and distinctiveness of the storm to the drama, the storm tends to be marginalised in critical analyses of King Lear.

When the storm is mentioned, it is usually interpreted as either a metaphor for Lear’s mind or a symbol for another theme, idea or emotion. This thesis challenges the default understanding of the storm as a symbol and argues that it is primarily a meteorological storm, the significance of which is derived from its physical presence in the human drama, rather than its resemblance or similarity to it. That is, the storm is a violent weather event that materially imposes itself upon the play. It is distinct from, albeit related to, Lear and the other characters. But they are all forced to respond to the storm’s meteorological force. Furthermore, it shall be argued that Shakespeare harnessed the material violence of the storm in order to explore the relationship between king, kingdom and cosmos at a historical moment when these relations were being cast into doubt and that this cosmological reading of the storm itself can be reanimated in our own contemporary situation.

This analysis is located in a long tradition of scholarship that explores

Shakespeare’s plays as both works of early modern drama, written for performance in a particular context, and canonical works of English dramatic literature authored by a playwright now considered iconic. In other words, this thesis considers both the theatricality of the storm in performance and the poetry of the dramatic text. The main body of the thesis uses a variety of different methodological strategies to extrapolate the multifaceted significance of these important scenes. A wide-angle lens is used to bring the historical conditions that gave rise to Shakespeare’s rewriting of the old Lear story

2 into focus, and also to observe the changing theatrical representation of the storm over time. But equivalent critical value is placed on poetics of the dialogue itself and what the words reveal about a particular character’s interpretation of the storm at a given moment in the play. The aim of this Introduction, however, is to provide an overview of the mainstream critical interpretations of the storm to date, because these conventional understandings of the storm will come under challenge in the chapters that follow.

The storm is usually thought to have an exclusive relationship with Lear. Three celebrated images of Lear, all of which were created in the late eighteenth century, illustrate this idea: Joshua Reynolds’s Study for King Lear (Illus. 1), George Romney’s

Head of King Lear (Illus. 2) and James Barry’s King Lear weeping over the dead body of

Cordelia (Illus. 3). Predating the modern critical tendency to see the storm as a symbol exclusively of Lear’s situation, these images, all of Lear’s windswept head, offer a visual interpretation of the King’s turbulent emotional state.

This motif was developed by Reynolds and Romney in studies of Lear’s face, but was picked up by Barry and turned into a full-scale neoclassical painting of the play’s final scene, in which the storm still services the representation of Lear’s passions.

The painting depicts Lear with the dead body of Cordelia in his arms, the dead body of either Goneril or Regan beneath his feet and the body of Edmund being carried off to the left. The storm has passed, the skies are clearing, but Lear’s hair is blown by a wind that does not seem to affect anyone else in the painting. Lear holds his hand to his head, at once grief-stricken and protecting himself from the wind, which is represented in this painting as a symbolic representation of his passions.

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Illus. 1: Joshua Reynolds, Study for King Lear (top left). Illus. 2: George Romney, Head of King Lear (top right). Illus. 3: James Barry, King Lear weeping over the dead body of Cordelia (bottom).

4 Indeed in all these images, but especially in Barry’s, Lear’s passions are visually expressed by the wind in his hair. But as a physical phenomenon, the wind is not targeted or purposeful as it seems to be in Barry’s painting. Rather it is distinctively imprecise and indiscriminate. Indeed, the wind in King Lear is part of a storm that is decidedly unwieldy; in 3.1 a knight describes the wind as ‘impetuous’ (3.1.8), making

‘nothing of’ (3.1.9) Lear’s white hair. In contrast to the carefully targeted motif of the magically windswept Lear, this thesis will show how the storm is a meteorological event that affects more than Lear’s white hair.

In doing so I am writing against the grain of a long critical tradition. Since the early nineteenth century, the dominant critical tendency has been to see the storm as not in itself important. As the following will show, the storm is rarely understood as an active part of the action itself and considered on those terms. There are subtle differences in the ways in which the critics below characterise the relationship between the storm and the drama, but in all these instances there is an avoidance of understanding the meteorological storm as a meaningful part of the dramatic world, either because the storm is deemed a distraction or it is seen as a symbolic expression of the human drama. The following overview of the critical history serves to highlight the pervasive historical construction of the storm as a metaphor for Lear’s mind or some other aspect of the human drama, and illustrate the degree to which this view is entrenched in the critical imagination.

One of the earliest critical reflections on the storm in King Lear is Charles

Lamb’s essay ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare: Considered with Reference to their

Fitness for Stage Representation’ (1810). When Lamb wrote this essay, Shakespeare’s

Lear had not been staged in full since the 1670s, having been replaced by Nahum Tate’s

Restoration adaptation The History of King Lear (1681). Lamb speculates on whether

5 Shakespeare’s version should be returned to the stage. ‘Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on stage’, he concludes.1 For Lamb, the reason King Lear cannot be staged is because the storm itself dwarfs Lear:

The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passions are terrible as a volcano; they are storms turning up and disclosing the bottom of the sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare … On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear but we are Lear – we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms.2

There is much more to be said about Lamb’s analysis in its particular historical context and this shall be returned to in Chapter Two; for the moment I simply wish to highlight the distinction drawn between Lear and the storm. What Lamb imagines he would see on stage was a king dwarfed by a theatrical storm, utterly disempowered by a force larger than himself. Conversely, what he reads on the page is a character with an interior life and complex feelings about his situation. Lamb sees a distinction between the storm and Lear, but also states a preference for probing Lear’s inner experience. He desires to understand Lear’s point of view, and he argues that Shakespeare’s play should not be staged because when we sit in the theatre overwhelmed by the stage spectacle of the storm, we would be distracted from what really mattered, a proper understanding of

Lear’s magnificent mind. Conversely, this thesis revisits what, according to Lamb, is the ‘painful and disgusting’3 fact of seeing an actor playing Lear utterly dwarfed by the storm.

William Hazlitt’s 1817 reflection on King Lear is similar to that of Lamb. At

Hazlitt’s time of writing all productions of King Lear, whether Shakespeare’s or Tate’s,

1 C. Lamb, ‘On the tragedies of Shakspeare: Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation’ (orig. publ. 1810) in J.M. Brown (ed.), The Portable Charles Lamb, Penguin, London, 1980, p.575. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., p.174. 6 were banned in England due to sensitivities around King George III’s insanity.4 Like

Lamb, Hazlitt hopes that Shakespeare’s play will never return to the stage: ‘We wish that we could pass this play over, and say nothing about it’.5 For all that, he remains interested in understanding Lear’s mind:

The mind of Lear, staggering between the weight of attachment and the hurried movements of passion, is like a tall ship driven about by the winds, buffeted by the furious waves, but that still rides above the storm, having its anchor fixed in the bottom of the sea; or it is like the sharp rock circled by the eddying whirlpool that forms and beats against it, or like the solid promontory pushed from its basis by the force of an earthquake.6

By likening Lear’s mind to a solid object that is buffeted about by wind and waves,

Hazlitt reifies Lear’s interiority and psychological complexity rather than exploring any broader relation with the winds, waves, whirlpools or earthquakes that threaten to shake it. For Hazlitt, the external events and forces are secondary to his interest in Lear’s sublime psychological condition.

In Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) A.C. Bradley agrees with both Lamb and

Hazlitt that ‘King Lear is too huge for the stage’.7 But Bradley prefers to understand the enormity of the drama by conflating the storm and the King’s emotional state:

The explosions of Lear’s passions, and the bursts of rain and thunder, are not, what for the senses they must be, two things, but manifestations of one thing. It is the powers of the tormented soul that we hear and see in the ‘groans of roaring wind and rain’ and the ‘sheets of fire’.8

Bradley claims that the storm and Lear’s situation are one and the same, that the storm is an expression of his emotions: a symbolic extension of his condition.

4 Depending on the source one consults, the ban was imposed in either 1810 or 1812. It was lifted upon the King’s death in 1820. 5 W. Hazlitt, The Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, C.H. Reynell, London, 1817, p.153. 6 Ibid., p.154. 7 A.C. Bradley, ‘Lecture VII on King Lear’ in Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, (orig. publ. 1904), The Echo Library, Fairford, 2006, p.135. 8 Ibid., p.146. 7 The diminishing of the storm itself continues in Harley Granville-Barker’s famous preface to King Lear (1927):

The storm is not in itself, moreover, dramatically important, only in its effect upon Lear. How, then, to give it enough magnificence to impress him, yet keep it from rivalling him? Why, by identifying the storm within, setting the actor to impersonate both Lear and – reflected in Lear – the storm.9

For Granville-Barker the storm is a vehicle Shakespeare used to theatrically explore

Lear’s interiority, but he did not see it as having any other important dramatic purpose.

As far as Granville-Barker is concerned, Shakespeare only included a storm for Lear’s emotional benefit. Indeed, he takes issue with Lamb and Bradley because he thought that they had believed the play to be ‘too huge’ for theatrical performance because the live theatre lacked the means to represent the storm as an extension of Lear’s mind.10

The latter issue will be pursued in full in Chapter Three, where Granville-Barker’s 1940 stage production of King Lear will be examined in relation to his critical views.

In ‘The Lear Universe’ (1930), G. Wilson Knight declared the play to be about the entire universe, life and all the ages of man, and also that the entirety of the dramatic action was enclosed in nature’s ‘earthly womb’.11 But even in his cosmic and corporal interpretation of the play’s themes, he positions the storm in a symbolic relationship to the rest of the drama:

The violent and extravagant effects of the storm-scene kindle the imagination till it cannot watch, but rather lives within, the passionate event. Then follows the extravaganza of Lear, Edgar, and the Fool, with their variegated play of the fantastic to the sound of thunder, lit by the nimble

9 H. Granville-Barker, ‘King Lear’ in Prefaces to Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, (orig. publ. 1927), Vol.. 1 of 5, B.T. Batsford, London, 1964, p.266. 10 Ibid., p.267 11 G.W. Knight, ‘The Lear Universe’ in The Wheel of Fire, (orig. publ. 1930), Routledge, London and New York, 2001, pp 201-234. 8 strokes of lightning. This is purely a phantasma of the mind: Lear’s mind capering on the page with antic gesture.12

On the one hand, Knight claimed that the philosophy of King Lear is ‘firmly planted in the soil of the earth’,13 but on the other that the very storm that turns that soil to mud is just Lear’s neurological phantasm. Even in his book-length study The Shakespearean

Tempest (1932), he holds this position on the storm: ‘The tempest here both points [to] the tempest in Lear’s mind and, more realistically, shows Lear as braving the cruelty of nature as an anodyne to human unkindness.’14

In his seminal text The Elizabethan World Picture (1942), E. M. Tillyard takes a position not dissimilar to Bradley’s. He describes the function of the storm as similar to that of Lear’s inner tumult:

Lear’s first words in the storm invoke explicitly all four elements in their uproars; and though these are presented not in abstraction but as manifested in the concrete natural happenings, the basic elemental conflict is as much a part of his thought as is the actual violence of the weather.15

Tillyard’s book was incredibly influential and spawned a generation of Shakespeare scholars interested in reading correspondences between the heavens and the earth.

Indeed, Tillyard’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s work also gave rise to the idea that the storm was the macrocosmic reflection of the tumult in the microcosm. In 1951

George W. Williams argued that the human conflict and the heavens were in an analogous relationship with each other:

The correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm, macrocosmic violence in terms of the microcosm, suggests additional and amplifying correspondences; the kingdom and

12 Ibid., pp.229-230. 13 Ibid., p.203. 14 G.W. Knight, The Shakespearean Tempest: with a Chart of the Shakespearean Dramatic Universe, (orig. publ. 1932), Methuen, London, 1964, p.196. 15 E. M. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (orig. publ. 1942), Vintage Books, London, 2011, p.64. 9 family, the body politic and the body domestic, are caught up in this mesh of interlocking connotations.16

So similar in shape are all the corresponding aspects of the play that the skies have the same characteristics as individual sentences. Williams argued that the ‘most notable’ feature of Lear’s great ‘Blow winds’ speech (3.2) is the ‘frequency of fricatives and stops in clusters of onomatopoetic vernacular words chosen to suggest the roughness and harshness of the weather’.17 By focussing on the correspondences between the storm and Lear, Williams imagines a near-perfect mathematical order in the Lear universe, one in which each element of the world perfectly reflects another.

The idea of storm as a macrocosmic reflection of the chaos in the microcosm held sway for many decades. In a 1952 response to Williams’s article, E. Catherine

Dunn agreed with his analysis of the correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm, but took issue with his framing of the play as Christian. Williams argued that Shakespeare’s choice of images—‘cataracts and hurricanoes’ and the cracking of

‘nature’s moulds’—invoked a Christian narrative of the Deluge and eschatological destruction.18 Dunn countered with a Pagan reading of these correspondences and within this explicitly described the storm as a metaphor. She linked up the daughters’ ingratitude with Empedoclean notions of Love and Strife and the conflict between the four elements, earth, fire, water and wind, concluding that ‘ingratitude ... is crucial to the interpretation of the storm metaphor, for it is that evil which breaks the heart of

Lear, shatters his reason, and bursts asunder the bonds of family affection in him. By metaphorical extension it is ingratitude which breaks the tranquillity of nature and

16 G. W. Williams, ‘The Poetry of the Storm in King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol.2, No.1, 1951, (pp.57-71) p.59. 17 Ibid., p.60. 18 Ibid., p.67. 10 causes the storm.’19 In 1972 Kenneth Muir also interpreted the storm in this way. Lear’s

‘refusal to ease his heart by weeping is accompanied by the first rumblings of the storm, which is a projection on the macrocosm of the tempest in the microcosm’. 20 More recently still, in Green Shakespeare (2006) Gabriel Egan argued that in the storm scenes, ‘Shakespeare emphasized instead the other microcosmic/macrocosmic correspondence: the weather is a version of the storm in Lear’s mind.’21 Egan has also written more recently on the broader relevance of Tillyard’s methodology for today.22

This final example is especially surprising, because, while Egan’s branch of

Shakespeare scholarship is explicitly interested in revitalising and reanimating the relations between the human world and the wider environment,23 the materiality of the storm and its physical violence fail to play any significant part in his analysis. Because it is understood to symbolise or correspond to other aspects of the drama and enhance them by association, in none of these readings is the storm regarded as important in itself.

More recent interpretations tend to collect all these subtly different perspectives on the storm, that it is an extension of Lear’s mind or a reflection of the political strife, and vaguely suggest that the storm symbolises all of these different things at once. In the 2002 Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy, all storms are described as generic symbols for change and confusion at all levels of the drama:

The great storm passages in Julius Caesar, Othello, and King Lear, where ‘the conflicting elements’ (Tim. 4.3.231) are thrown into wild disorder and function as central symbols for a pervasive

19 E. Catherine Dunn, ‘The Storm in King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol.3, No.4, 1952, (pp.329-333) p.329. 20 K. Muir, Shakespeare’s Tragic Sequence, Routledge, London, 1972, p.129. 21 G. Egan, Green Shakespeare: from Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism, Routledge, London and New York, 2006, p.144. 22 See, for example his ‘Gaia and the Great Chain of Being’ in L. Bruckner and D. Brayton (eds), Ecocritical Shakespeare, Ashgate, London, 2011, pp.57-70. 23 For more on this theoretical wing of Shakespeare scholarship, see the other contributions to L. Bruckner and D. Brayton (eds), Ecocritical Shakespeare, Ashgate, London, 2011. 11 sense of violent change and confusion, a technique reinforced by sustained use of elemental imagery elsewhere in each play.24

In 2003 R.A. Foakes likewise saw the storm as a symbol of a range of different kinds of conflict in the drama:

The storm dramatized in King Lear functions in much greater depth at the centre of the action, as an extension of the turmoil in Lear’s mind, as a symbolic embodiment of the confusion and discord in the kingdom, and potentially as an expression of the anger of the gods. It also seems to spring from the violence Lear has unleashed in his kingdom, and to gather up and reflect in its fury the cruelty those in power inflict on others.25

As unwieldy as the storm appears for McAlindon and Foakes, the storm is not a storm, it is a metaphor for multiple complexities in the human drama; the storm is a poetic or dramatic by-product. Foakes’s claim that the storm seems to ‘spring from’ the violence of the play is a synecdoche for this larger tradition. But as I see it, the storm does not spring from the violence of the play, but rather brings its own violent material force to the play. This distinction may appear subtle, but it is fundamental to my reading of the storm’s meaning and function in the play. Over the course of the thesis I work against the dominant interpretation of the storm as a symbol for Lear’s mind or a reflection of the political conflict, and work to reintegrate the storm itself into an analysis of the drama.

A new interest in the storm itself has emerged during this thesis project. In 2010, both Gwilym Jones and Steve Mentz published work on the storm in King Lear. Jones sees the storm as ‘just a storm’26 and Mentz sees it as a representation of ‘post-

24 T. McAlindon, ‘What is a Shakespearean Tragedy?’ in C. McEachern (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, (pp.1- 22) p.6. 25 R.A. Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, p.184. 26 G. Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Sussex, 2010, Sussex Research Online, retrieved from http://eprints.sussex.ac.uk, 19 August 2010, p.89. 12 equilibrium ecology’.27 The methods, aim and scope of their analyses differ quite substantially to my own. Jones’s thesis is focussed on storms in several of Shakespeare’s works and his chapter on King Lear considers the storm in relation to its location on the heath. In contrast, Mentz uses the discourse of ecocriticism to characterise the storm scenes as an example of the most up-to-date scientific understanding of the biosphere.

Conversely, this thesis takes a more conventional approach to the storm, by exploring the history of the storm on stage and engaging in a close reading of the scenes. So, rather than describing their arguments here, their research will be integrated into the thesis where relevant.

In order to challenge the dominant critical understanding of the storm as a symbol, this thesis is broken down into two parts. Part One, ‘A Historical Overview of the Storm’, explores the likely significance of the storm in its seventeenth century context and maps the changing significance of the storm on stage between early seventeenth century productions and today. This long historical overview is designed to highlight the ever-evolving significance of the storm. Part Two, entitled ‘A New

Interpretation of the Storm’, offers a close reading of King Lear taking into account the physical force of the storm.

In Chapter One the storm is explored in its seventeenth-century historical context, with a particular focus on general cultural ideas that likely informed

Shakespeare’s meteorological imagination. First, the Aristotelian roots of the early modern understanding of the weather are highlighted in order to investigate how the conventions for the dramatic representation of storms stem from this tradition. Second, the storm is explored within its theatrical context to show how Shakespeare’s play not only breaks with established dramatic conventions, but also opens up a new way of

27 S. Mentz, 'Strange Weather in King Lear', Shakespeare, Vol.6, No.2, June 2010, pp.139-152. 13 thinking about the relationship between humans and the weather. Third, the chapter reveals how, along with the subplot and the tragic ending, the storm is one of

Shakespeare’s key innovations in his retelling of the old Lear story. As a whole, the argument of this chapter is that Shakespeare’s version of the old tale references an ancient tradition of philosophical speculation in the face of meteorological violence, calls into question the correspondence between king, kingdom and cosmos and, at the same time, reveals the complex and changing relationship between humans, political systems and the weather in 1606.

While the meteorological storm takes on radical cosmological and historical significance in Chapter One, we categorically do not view the storm in such terms today. What changes between 1606 and today? How is it possible to lose sight of the material force of a cataclysmic event that spans two acts and eight scenes of a drama? It is impossible to answer these questions in full; the historical changes are too vast to articulate. As such, Chapters Two and Three focus in on the theatrical history of King

Lear in order to map the evolution of its representation on stage. An overview of the play’s production history between 1606 and 2012, focussing largely on British stagings of the play, reveals the storm as an ever-evolving theatrical entity, the meaning of which is not static over time. Indeed, the significance of the storm is entirely dependent upon, and can only be understood in terms of, the dramatic story in which it is so spectacular a feature. Thus, over the centuries the significance of the storm changed in line with both adaptations to the performance text and, of course, a growing sophistication in stage technology. To this end, Chapter Two reveals a fixation on the meteorological storm from 1606 until the end of the nineteenth century, but largely it is part of Nahum Tate’s

1681 adaptation in which a heroic King Lear triumphs in the end. In Chapter Three the storm on the modern stage is explored. We see how swiftly the storm becomes a

14 symbolic expression of either personal or political tumult. At the same time the critical tendency to cast the storm as a symbol or metaphor evolves. Although I will show how by end of the twentieth century a more complex vision of the storm is created on stage, the critical tradition cares little for understanding the function and significance of the storm beyond its relation to Lear.

Chapter Four begins the thorough rethinking of the storm’s function in King

Lear, that occupies the rest of the thesis. This chapter will explore how we understand

Lear’s situation differently if we account for the materiality of the storm itself. So, instead of regarding the weather as symbolic of Lear’s mental tempest, Lear’s experience both out in the storm and sheltering from the storm is revealed as a shameful transformation brought about by the storm’s indifference. I characterise Lear as ashamed of his mortality, complicate this in terms of the idea of ‘The King’s Two

Bodies’ and see Lear’s experience of exposure to the material event as compelling him to confront and contend with the most shameful aspects of himself. This chapter is a reading for today insofar as it is difficult and complex to reflect upon what it means to be faced by an indifferent and hostile storm. Yet such traumatic reflection is what is necessary if indeed we are to culturally process the climate that is changing despite our desire for stability.

In my fifth and final chapter I continue to unfold the significance of the storm’s materiality and indifferent presence by exploring it in relation to other aspects of the drama. I use political philosophy and the idea of ‘natural disaster’ to reanimate the materiality and physical violence of the storm in relation to the broader dramatic situation. I explore the experience of other characters in the storm and the geopolitical arrangement of Lear’s kingdom. In this chapter the storm is studied not only as an event

15 that relates exclusively to Lear, but also as an event that involves every inch of the kingdom in the tragic conflict.

The most important point here is that my analysis positions the material storm as indifferent to the human drama. In other words it is a material force to which the characters are obliged to respond. But it is not the bearer of any explicit message or in any way particularly concerned with the drama. I am not the first to suggest that the storm is physically indifferent to Lear. Charles Lamb implied as much when he observed how the powerless King was dwarfed by the storm, and Maynard Mack made the point explicitly when he wrote that ‘nature proves to be indifferent or hostile’28 in

King Lear. But I am the first to consider this feature of the text in any detail and, in short, I contend—and it is the overarching argument of the thesis as a whole—that its complex relationship with the entire dramatic situation lends deep historical, social and political significance to Shakespeare’s storm as a meteorological event.

There are some key terms used throughout the thesis that draw on archaic definitions and need clarification from the outset. The first is ‘meteors’, frequently used as a substitute for the word ‘weather’. In the Meteorologica Aristotle does not use the word ‘weather’ as a general term for all atmospheric disturbances, but rather catalogues various individual phenomena in the skies and classifies all of them as ‘meteors’.29

While today the word ‘meteor’ signifies a rock of extraterrestrial origin burning up upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere, until the early nineteenth century a ‘meteor’ was not just a shooting star, but an umbrella term for all kinds of meteorological phenomena,

28 M. Mack, King Lear in Our Time, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972, p.63. 29All references are to Aristotle, Meteorologica, H.D.P. Lee (trans.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. Heinemann, London, 1952. Subsequent references will be placed in the body of the text, giving section, chapter and line.

16 such as thunder, lightning, wind and rain. More to the point, the term ‘meteors’ is useful for this thesis because, as will become clear in the first chapter, the term evokes the extraterrestrial or cosmological dimension of the weather phenomena integral to early modern meteorology.

Other significant words that appear frequently in the thesis are ‘cosmos’ (and

‘cosmology’, ‘cosmic’ and ‘cosmological’), which are used in place of the terms

‘universe’ and ‘worldview’. In the first chapter this word set has quite an obvious and specific meaning. It is used to refer directly to classical ideas about the nature and shape of the universe and how that relates to the world itself. But the word set is maintained throughout the thesis to refer more generally to worldview or to indicate the whole world as it is conceived or imagined by a character. When ‘cosmos’ or ‘cosmology’ is referred to after the early modern period, it more specifically relates to the perceived relationships between the human, the political or social systems that organise the wider world.30 I retain the word cosmology because this helps maintain the logical link between the weather and world beyond Lear’s mind, which is important for my argument.31 Thus the words ‘meteors’ and ‘cosmos’ appear throughout the thesis because they help reanimate the materiality of the storm.

30 The structure of this definition is inspired by Felix Guattari’s essay ‘The Three Ecologies’ (human subjectivity, social relations and the environment), a work of speculative philosophy motivated by the radical hope that understanding the entanglement in his essay would eventually ‘lead to a reframing and a recomposition of the goals of (all) emancipatory struggles’ (The Three Ecologies, Continuum, New York, 2000, p.49). I do not draw directly on this work here, and although I might share the hope that a single essay would be able to catalyse such change, I am not as optimistic; despite our differences, there are shared sensibilities between my idea of the relationship between king, kingdom and cosmos and his modern theorization of the entanglement between human, social and environmental spheres. 31 For work that explores cosmology in a modern context, using a range of different terms from ‘cosmology’, ‘worlding’ to ‘life worlds’, see M. Ohanian and J. Royoux (eds), Cosmograms, Lukas and Sternberg, New York, 2005; J. Tresch, ‘Technological World Pictures: Cosmic Things and Cosmograms’, Isis, Vol.98, 2007, pp.84-99; D. Harraway ‘Foreword: companion species, mis-recognition and queer worlding’ in N. Giffney and M. Hird (eds), Queering the Non/Human, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2008 (xxiii-xxvi), J. von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning, J. O’Neill (ed. and trans.), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2010. 17 Furthermore, I explore King Lear as a text of poetic dialogue with an overarching dramatic narrative that is ultimately designed for performance in a theatre.

Thus, at times King Lear is referred to as having ‘poetic’, ‘dramatic’ and ‘theatrical’ properties respectively. A reference to the play’s ‘poetic’ features means the language and structure of the dialogue itself is under analysis and that the idea represented therein is not necessarily supported or validated by the dramatic narrative as a whole. A reference to the ‘dramatic’ function of something signals its purpose and place in the overall plot of King Lear. Finally, when the ‘theatrical’ aspect of the storm or a character is mentioned, it indicates the analysis of its likely function or appearance for an audience.

18

Part 1: A Historical Overview of the Storm

19 Chapter 1

A Cosmological Cataclysm: Early Modern Meteorology, Dramatic Weather and King Lear's Idiosyncratic Storm

In the early modern period storms of great magnitude that caused extensive damage and loss of life took on particular cultural significance, prompting zealous pamphleteers to write lengthy tracts about them and religious scholars of various denominations to interpret them as acts of God, punishments for man’s misdeeds.1 It is within a world of deep anxiety and divided opinion about the cosmic significance of meteorological violence that Shakespeare decided to retell the story of King Lear and to set square in its centre as massive a storm as the early modern stage may yet have seen.

In order to move away from a reading that sees the storm solely in terms of Lear, towards one that sees it tied to just about every facet of the play, this chapter begins by sketching the cultural context within which Shakespeare imagined his storm. To animate the material dimensions of early modern meteorology, we start with a consideration of Aristotle’s meteorological model and the way in which that relates to both the broader cultural understanding of the weather in the early modern period and to the conventions for representing the weather in the theatre. Having established the key aspects of Aristotle’s influential materialist philosophy, Shakespeare’s storm will be explored in terms of how it references and departs from a classically inspired model of meteorological representation and in crafting the storm in King Lear the dramatist departed from the usual use of meteorological events within drama. Furthermore, in the early seventeenth century the weather had a complex and very material link with the cosmos – weather events were not just imagined as metaphorical signs from God, the gods, devils or demons, but such ideas were physically structured into the dominant

1 For an extensive analysis of this aspect of early modern culture, see A. Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001. 20 geocentric worldview of the time. In other words, due to the perceived structure of the cosmos, it was literally possible to imagine a supernatural being meddling with the meteors. Thus, this chapter analyses the significance of Shakespeare’s storm within a context in which storms were usually imagined to have some kind of divine or demonic import, and theorise the radical and provocative historical implications of representing a storm that is ultimately indifferent to the human beings and their petty conflicts.

1.1. Aristotelian Meteorology

Aristotle's Meteorologica (350 B.C.E.), generally recognised as the first systematic study of the weather, dominated the natural philosophy of meteorology until the late seventeenth century, long after Shakespeare’s death.2 In relation to his Poetics and Physics, Meteorologica is one of Aristotle’s lesser-known works, but in the early modern period university graduates were schooled in Aristotelian meteorology from the thirteenth century onwards.3 Of course, Shakespeare was not schooled in this way, but because Aristotle’s model was widely read, as I shall show presently, it influenced the way poets and dramatists imagined the weather in a range of ways. In a more general sense, the basic structure and vocabulary of Aristotelian meteorology also filtered down from the educated elite, and formed part of the general cultural understanding of the meteors during this period.4 On the one hand, the long description of the meteors that ensues reveals a different model for thinking about the weather, which is important for this chapter. But on the other hand, the description activates a materialist mode of

2 Aristotle, Meteorologica, H.D.P. Lee (trans.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. Heinemann, London, 1952. 3 C. Martin, Renaissance Meteorology: Pomponazzi to Descartes, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2011, p.5. 4 S.K. Heninger, 'Meteorological Theory and its Literary Paraphrase' in A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology: with Particular Reference to Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature, Duke University Press, Durham, 1960, pp.37-46. 21 thinking about the weather and animates its philosophical implications, both of which are integral to the overall argument of the thesis.

Aristotle's meteorological system was linked to a geocentric cosmological model that placed the earth as the fixed centre, around which the heavens turned; the meteors occupied the space between the moon and the earth. Meteorological movement, he argued, was generated by the rotations of the heavens around the earth: ‘The (terrestrial) region must be continuous with the motions of the heavens, which therefore regulate its whole capacity for movement: the celestial element as source of all motion must be regarded as first cause’ (1.2.21-25). The spheres above the moon were known as the celestial spheres; bodies in the celestial sphere were made up of one element only, ether.

The spheres below the moon were the sublunary or terrestrial spheres. The meteors are found in these spheres and are the imperfect combinations of the four elements: earth, fire, wind and water. The sublunary realm was stratified into distinct spheres, as shown in the late sixteenth-century images of the geocentric cosmos (Illus. 4) and of the spheres below the moon (Illus. 5). The first image below the lunar sphere is marked with a crescent moon and the two spheres between the moon and the earth are the sublunary spheres. This image captures the literal link between the earth, meteors and the heavens and their spatial arrangement as parts of a whole cosmos. But also noteworthy is the perceived scale of the sublunary spheres with regard to the rest of the heavens; although today we think of the earth’s atmosphere as dwarfed by the enormous and infinite universe, the sublunary spheres took up a significant portion of the whole geocentric cosmos.

22 Illus. 4: A late sixteenth-century representation of the geocentric cosmos

Within this general cosmological framework, meteorology was the study of the way in which the different meteors were produced. For Aristotle, ‘meteorology’ was the study of ‘meteors’, literally meaning ‘something raised up’.5 While the study of atmospheric disturbances and weather patterns is still called ‘meteorology’, the word

‘meteor’ refers today to just one atmospheric phenomenon, a small extra-terrestrial rock

5 Heninger, Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, p.3. 23 that burns up upon entering the earth’s atmosphere. But until the eighteenth century the word 'meteor' denoted a range of different atmospheric phenomena stemming from

Aristotle's original definitions: hurricanes, whirlwinds, thunder and lightning, rain, hail, snow, rainbows, clouds, mist and dew. Other phenomena that no longer fall into the study of modern meteorology, but were once classified as meteors include coastal erosion, silting, the saltiness of the sea, comets, earthquakes and shooting stars.6

Meteors were imagined as complex combinations of the different elements and their essential qualities, produced by such means as the relationship between the heat of the sun and the rotations of the heavens around the earth. There were four qualities to the elements: hot, dry, cold and moist. Each element had two essential qualities: earth was cold and dry; air was hot and wet; fire was hot and dry, and water was cold and wet. Although any meteor could be produced anywhere, given the right conditions, it was thought that, in the sublunary spheres, the airy and fiery meteors, (lightning, thunder, comets and shooting stars), were produced higher up and the earthy and watery ones (coastal erosion, saltiness of the sea, wind, rain, snow, rainbows, clouds, mist, earthquakes and dew) down closer to the earth. Meteors fell into two main categories: vapours and exhalations: ‘Vapour is naturally moist and cold’, wrote Aristotle, ‘and exhalation is hot and dry: and vapour is potentially like water, exhalation is potentially like fire’ (1.3.27-29). Vaporous meteors were the various formations of water above the earth responding in complex ways to the heat of the sun.7 Exhalations were a more eclectic mix of hot and dry phenomena.8

6 From our modern perspective, earthquakes are perhaps the most unlikely phenomenon to be classified as a ‘meteor’, given that they occur underground and that we now understand them as the movement of the tectonic plates. But for many centuries earthquakes were thought to be caused by powerful subterranean winds that found their way underground through openings in the Earth’s surface and, as such, they were classified as ‘meteors’. 7 Rain, for example, was produced ‘when the heat which caused (water) to rise leaves it … the vapour cools and condenses again as a result of the loss of heat and the height and turns from air 24

Illus. 5: Two sixteenth-century representations of the sublunary spheres

The material constitution of the meteors was unstable. As mentioned earlier, meteors were combinations of different elements, but they were not conceived of as substances in their own right. For Aristotle, the fact of a meteor’s formation was accidental. This mutable materiality is a subtle but conceptually important feature of classical meteorology. Craig Martin has identified a long tradition of characterising the meteors as nature's accidents spanning from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century:

Albertus Magnus [13th Century] ... described [meteors] as matter that is in a state of becoming a simple substance … [and] John Buridan [14th Century] was one of the first to use the term imperfect mixtures to categorise meteorological effects in contrast to the perfect mixtures, such as flesh, blood, milk or metals.9

into water: and having become water again, falls again onto the earth’ (1.9.26-31). The vapours were the evaporation and condensation of water in relation to the sun. 8 Aristotle described the two kinds of exhalations as follows: ‘Exhalations that arise from the earth when it is heated by the sun … (are) of two kinds; one is more vaporous in character, the other more windy, the vapour rising from the water within and upon the earth, while the exhalations from the earth itself, which is dry, are more like smoke’ (1.4.8-11). 9 Martin, Renaissance Meteorology, p.27. 25 Furthermore, according to Martin, the mid-sixteenth-century meteorologist Marcus

Frytsche described a meteor as something ‘that happens in the upper regions of the air’ and as ‘close to being an element’.10 As Martin points out, the word ‘happens’ translates from Latin ‘accidere’, thereby forging a conceptual and etymological linkage between the meteors and the notion of the accident. Martin’s point is that the consensus amongst natural philosophers from the thirteenth century onward is that the meteors are accidental, incomplete and imperfect.

Despite the tradition of understanding the meteors as nature’s accidents, when they did materialise they were understood as distinct, albeit temporary, entities, produced by specific atmospheric situations. For example, Aristotle characterises thunder and lightning, rain and hurricanes as related but distinct:

The windy exhalation causes thunder and lightning when it is produced in small quantities, widely dispersed, and at frequent intervals, and when it spreads quickly and is of extreme rarity. But when it is produced in a compact mass and is denser, the result is a hurricane, which owes its violence to the force which the speed of its separation gives it. When there is an abundant and constant flow of exhalation the process is similar to the opposite process which produces rain and large quantities of water. Both possibilities are latent in the material and when an impulse is given which may lead to the development of either, the one of which there is the greater quantity latent in the material, is forthwith formed from it, and either rain, or, if it is the other exhalation that predominates, a hurricane is produced (3.1.11-18).

There is nothing especially surprising about this physical distinction: then as now, a hurricane was distinct from a light showering of rain. I underline this point simply because in the limited scholarship hitherto devoted to violent weather conditions in

Shakespeare, storms are rarely separated from thunder and lightning in any meaningful

10 Ibid., p.10. 26 way.11 But of course a hurricane or storm is different from thunder and lightning. But the distinction between storms/hurricanes and thunder/lightning – and they are very distinct, of course – will become clear when I turn to examine the significance and function of these meteorological events in Shakespeare’s play.

There was also an explicit link between Aristotelian meteorology and classical cosmology. In a geocentric cosmos, the weather was literally the medium between the heavens and the earth. If a meteorological sign was considered a sign from God, this connection was not just metaphysical, but also direct and material. For instance, the image below (Illus. 6), published in The Nuremberg Chronicle in 1493, represents the geocentric cosmos similar to the one above (Illus. 4), but in this instance God and the angels inhabit the heavens; thus, it is easier to see why it was thought that the meteors were the mediators of the relationship between the heavens and the earth. When orthodox philosophers, poets, pamphleteers, priests and dramatists drew a link between the meteors and the heavens, or the meteors and the human world, it was not a religious metaphor or idle fantasy, but a description that awarded meaning to the material world as it was popularly imagined and literally understood in Britain and Europe until the late seventeenth century.12 Over the course of this chapter, these features of Aristotelian meteorology are gradually drawn into an analysis of the storm in King Lear.

Furthermore, as was said above, this model of meteorological thinking helps to emphasise the material aspects of the storm and reveal the complexity of meteorological natural philosophy that is important throughout the thesis.

11 For example, under the title, Shakespeare's Storms (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Sussex, 2010, Sussex Research Online, retrieved from http://eprints.sussex.ac.uk, 19 August 2010.), Gwilym Jones focuses on ‘Storm and tempest’ in King Lear and the ‘Thunder and lightning’ in Macbeth as ‘storms’, but I argue that the two are distinct in some ways due to their intensity and duration. 12 Although Copernicus’s heliocentric theory was published in 1543, and began to destabilize the dominant worldview soon after, the actual transition from the Classical to the Modern cosmological model took more than a century. The historical details of this slow transition shall be touched upon in more detail below. 27

Illus. 6: The geocentric cosmos represented with God in his heavenly seat

28 1.2. Dramatic Meteorology

The specific vocabulary of Aristotelian meteorology is clearly legible in the work of early modern English dramatists and poets like Spenser, Marlowe, Chapman,

Jonson and Shakespeare. References to the exhalations and vapours and all the aforementioned phenomena from rain to earthquakes were part of this meteorological imaginary. S.K. Heninger traces the influence of Aristotelian meteorology in early modern dramatic dialogue in exhaustive detail in the Handbook of Renaissance

Meteorology: with Particular Reference to Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature

(1960), which is divided into sections on vapours and exhalations, with subsections on the use of all the meteors from clouds to earthquakes. There is no need to repeat all

Heninger’s findings here: not only is his discussion of phenomena such as rainbows and dew, for example, irrelevant to my purpose, but also his focus, as his title clearly states, is the meaning of meteorological imagery on the printed page. However, I will briefly summarise the relevant material from Heninger and highlight some of the ways the meteors were incorporated in dramatic dialogue and poetry.

The most common use of the meteors in poetry and dramatic dialogue is as a metaphor or simile. For example, Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part I uses the wind as an extended metaphorical portent of the imminent battle: 'The southern wind / Doth play the trumpet to his purposes, / And by his hollow whistling in the leaves / Foretells a tempest and a blust’ring day' (Hen. IV, 1, 5.1.3-6). This kind of meteorological metaphor is common in the early modern repertoire, and Heninger catalogues numerous examples. Often the descriptions are more explicitly Aristotelian, invoking the vapours, exhalations and the rotations of the heavens. When it comes to King Lear, Heninger does not mention the storm as such, but rather other occasions when the meteors are mentioned in the dramatic dialogue. For example, he looks at the moments when Lear

29 calls upon the 'nimble lightnings' (2.2.354) to blind and the 'fen-suck'd fogs' (356) to destroy Regan’s beauty.13 With regards to the storm scenes Heninger is interested in the poetic references in the dialogue. For example he shows how 'Blow winds and crack your cheeks' (3.2.1) invokes the conventional visual representation of winds as cherubs with bursting round cheeks blowing down from the heavens,14 like the cheeks of the four cardinal winds represented in both the Nuremberg Chronicle image (Illus. 6). But

Heninger’s discussion of poetic moments in individual lines of dialogue does not address a spectacular meteorological event’s function in a dramatic story.

A meteorological event, such as the storm in King Lear or the thunder and lightning in Macbeth, has a more significant role in the overall dramatic story than the poetic allusions contained in individual lines of dialogue. 'Meteorological event' here refers to an instance of dramatic weather that exceeds the poetry of an individual line, impacts upon a dramatic story and is an imagined and/or staged entity distinct from the characters' spoken words. In a published play, such meteorological events are usually indicated by stage directions. In the early modern period common stage directions for storm-related meteorological events included: ‘Thunder’, 'Thunder and lightning' and, less frequently, ‘Storm’.15 In the case of King Lear there are no stage directions in the

Quarto texts (1608 & 1612), but the First Folio (1623) offers the unique directions

‘Storm and tempest’ in 2.2 and ‘Storm still’ in 3.1, 3.2 and 3.4.16 It is highly unlikely

13 Heninger, Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, p.62. 14 Ibid., p.118. 15 These conventions are catalogued in detail by Leslie Thomson in 'The Meaning of "Thunder and Lightning": Stage Directions and Audience Expectations' (Early Theatre, Vol.2, No.1, 1999, pp.11-24.) and in the introduction to Gwilym Jones' Shakespeare's Storms. 16 Beyond the stage directions, in Quarto and Folio there are many differences in the dialogue of the storm scenes. I am using the conflated text, so I do not present an extended comparison between the two editions here. There is scope for a future article on the disparities in the dialogue between Quarto and Folio. Such a study could investigate the meaningful differences between the early Quartos and the edits and additions made in the publication of the Folio. Specifically, the article could reflect upon how the subtle distinctions in what characters say when they are exposed to the storm and how they act in response to the storm impacts upon the 30 that directions were authorial and, as is the case with the directions in the Lear Folio, often they only appear in print well after a play’s first production. Usually either a theatre company’s scrivener or an editor at a printing house inserted stage directions into the text. For the purposes of this analysis it is important to keep in mind that, if nothing else, the stage directions in King Lear are textual markers of a meteorological event with substantial duration, that can be conceptualised as distinct from a character's dialogue. This section will now emphasise some of the ways in which meteorological events signalled by stage directions are used as devices within dramatic storytelling, paying particular attention to how, when and the extent to which a meteorological event intervenes in or impacts upon the trajectory of a play's narrative.

The most common meteorological stage direction was 'Thunder and lightning' and these violent meteors were used as a device within a dramatic story. First, thunder and lightning was a meteorological effect used to indicate the link between the legitimate king and the heavens. Sometimes this effect was used as a representation of the king’s legitimate power. The anonymous King Leir (1605) – one of Shakespeare’s sources and a playtext I shall return to below – offers a good example of this device: thunder and lightning is called for just as Leir is about to be murdered. The meteorological intervention frightens Leir’s enemy, who drops his dagger and rather than die then and there, Leir is able to reclaim the throne at the end of the play.17 This instance exemplifies the existence of a cause-and-effect correspondence between the stage effect and the dramatic story. Conversely, thunder sometimes signalled a darker supernatural and subversive force at work: thunder foreshadows the entry of demonic

conclusions we scholars can make regarding the meaning and function of the storm as a dramatic meteorological event. 17 Anonymous, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, (orig. publ. 1605), J. Farmer (ed.), The Tudor Facsimile Texts, London, 1910. 31 figures such as the Witches in Macbeth ('Thunder. Enter the three Witches' [1.3]), or

Mephistopheles in Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus ('Thunder. Enter Lucifer and foure devils' [1.3]).18 These devices imply a classical cosmology, in which the link between the heavens and the earth is manifest in the weather. Thunder could also strike to signal divine endorsement of a particular plot. This device was ubiquitous enough to be parodied by Thomas Middleton in The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606). Vindice suggests that the heavens have missed their cue: ‘Is there no thunder left, or is’t kept up / in stock for heavier vengeance? (Thunder) There it goes!’ (4.2.196-197).19 In contrast, the

‘Storm and tempest’ called for by the stage direction in the First Folio version of King

Lear is a different kind of meteorological device because it does not have a straightforward function within the drama: there is no divine intervention; there are no devils or demons; and the storm is not a response to Lear’s cries.

Both Thomson and Jones argue that the storm in King Lear departs from the conventional theatrical use of storms because it is not obviously connected with a divine or supernatural order. Both imply that the unique stage direction ‘Storm and tempest’ is the main clue. In Thomson’s view, ‘Thunder’ indicated supernatural activity, whereas

‘Storm and tempest’ did not. She then argues that the uniqueness of the direction provides the best insight into the storm’s meaning:

It is seldom critically defensible to try and relate a direction to a character’s response, since directions and dialogue function at different levels of the play text; but here, however accidentally, King Lear appears to illustrate my point (that the storm is not supernatural). Lear’s combined pride and self-pity foster his belief that the malevolent gods are punishing him, and he tries to control this by encouraging them. It is impossible to know if the signals for ‘Storm’ and ‘Storm still’ are authorial – certainly they are rare. Nevertheless, the use of ‘storm’ in the stage direction implicitly confirms that Lear is wrong to assume supernatural intervention; it

18 All references to works by Marlowe from C. Marlowe, The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, Volumes 1 and 2, F. Bowers (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1973. 19 T. Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy, (orig. publ. 1607), in K. Eisaman Maus (ed.), Four Revenge Tragedies, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995. 32 is only a storm – even if thunder and lightning are among the special effects at this point in the play.20

Jones takes issue with Thomson’s idea that the direction ‘storm’ confirms the fact it is not supernatural: ‘It seems a stretch too far to conclude that there are various tempestuous effects which have been ingrained in theatrical practice to the extent that the audience recognises that one is natural, one supernatural’.21 Whether or not the technology was the same is a secondary issue. Regardless of the technology used to create the storm or its imagined origin, in a meteorological sense there is a distinction between a storm and a tempest on the one hand and thunder and lightning on the other.

The latter is a momentary effect, whereas the former is a durational event. This may seem an obvious distinction, but it has significant implications for my analysis.

While it may in fact be impossible to know for certain what, if any, technological distinction early modern stage hands drew between a ‘Storm and tempest’ and ‘Thunder and lightning’ or ‘Thunder’, the key difference between the thunder in the aforementioned examples and King Lear’s storm is that the ‘Storm and tempest’ continues over several scenes. Even Julius Caesar, with its direction for ‘Thunder and lightning’ in both 1.3 and 2.2, does not compare to the scale and duration of the storm and tempest in King Lear, with stormy effects called for in at least four scenes.

Furthermore, while the rumble of thunder in the Anonymous Leir may have been made with the same drum as the thunder in productions of Shakespeare's play, there are many more rumbles of thunder called for in the Folio. In Shakespeare’s Lear, the thunder is accompanied by lightning, wind and rain. It is a durational event rather than a momentary effect. Thus, by virtue of its duration, the storm takes on a different presence within the drama.

20 Thomson, ‘The Meaning of “Thunder and Lightning”’, p.16. 21 Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms, p.24. 33 As such, the distinction between thunder and lightning and storm and tempest is better understood through the language of meteorology than the language of the theatre.

In meteorological terms, a storm and tempest is a different meteorological event from thunder and lightning. This basic physical distinction enhances our understanding of the most significant difference between Lear’s storm and tempest and the instances of thunder and lighting in other plays.22 These distinctions are physical and temporal. A storm or a tempest includes thunder and lightning, but also wind and rain; a storm is also a more violent and potentially destructive event. Furthermore, in King Lear the storm continues for at least five scenes over two acts. Thus, the different stage directions neatly, if accidently, capture the material distinction in the meteorological events that needs to be created on the stage.

Where instances of thunder and lightning usually only comprise a small aspect of a scene, in order to suggest divine intervention or endorsement, presage the entry of a demon or frighten a character, a storm or a tempest is an all-encompassing and structurally significant event. The scale and intensity of the meteorological event are analogous to the impact that that event has upon the structure or trajectory of the plot as a whole. For instance, violent sea storms form the premise of both The Comedy of

Errors and Twelfth Night, making the reunions of long-lost twins more or less plausible in the plots. In Pericles, the eponymous hero’s journey is made possible by two sea storms that carry him from place to place, storms that occur offstage between acts. For

22 Jones claims that there was probably no recognisable distinction between the representation of ‘Storms’ and ‘Thunder and lightning’ on the stage. This is likely the safest assumption, but it is possible that there were some differences. In Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in Early English and Scottish Theatre (Society for Theatre Research, London, 1998), Philip Butterworth shows that different kinds of powders produced different colours of smoke and light effects and what they would signal to an audience was distinct. Black, yellow and white smoke signaled different kinds of supernatural intervention, and the technology existed to deliver a thunderbolt strike from God or Jove directly to a character when necessary or simply suggest the rumbling thunder elsewhere. Thus it is quite possible that there was something visually distinct about the storm effects in King Lear as opposed to a clearly supernatural thunder and lightning like that in Macbeth or the divine intervention of the anonymous King Leir. 34 example, Pericles enters in 2.1 ‘wet' and talks about his time out in the 'Wind, rain, and thunder' (2.1.2) on the ocean. Similarly Lord Cerimon enters at 3.2 ‘with a Servant and another poor man, both storm-beaten' and they reflect upon the 'turbulent and stormy night' (3.2.4). There is also a sea storm in Marlowe's Dido: Queen of Carthage, one of the few indicated by the direction 'The storme' (3.4); this storm is powerful enough to trap Dido and Aeneas in a cave and provokes them to declare their love for one another.

In The Tempest Shakespeare exploits to the full the device of a storm to create the premise of his plot. The unusual stage direction, 'A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning is heard' (1.1), is hardly an adequate description of what modern directors arrange for the play’s opening scene.23 The storm rages throughout the scene, causing the ship carrying Prospero’s brother Antonio to wreck on the island. In setting up the pre-conditions of the plot, the tempest functions in the same way as those in A Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, except that Shakespeare requires that his Tempest be seen and heard.

Given that most meteorological stage directions call for something to be physically constructed on stage that has a purpose and function in the drama, the direction 'Storm and tempest' in King Lear does not indicate a poetic reference to the storm’s cosmological origin, but rather provides a clue to the theatre technician – whether that be the early modern or the twenty-first-century technician – as to the kind of effect to construct. In King Lear, the tautology of the direction is presumably designed to indicate that the weather should be especially horrible, destructive, spectacular and violent. Furthermore, with the ‘Storm and tempest’, coming as it does mid-scene at the end of Act Two and arguably continuing throughout the entire third

23 For discussions of the idiosyncratic stage directions in The Tempest, see J.A. Roberts, 'Ralph Crane and the Text of The Tempest', Shakespeare Studies, Vol.13, 1980, pp.213-234 and J. Jowett, 'New Creatures Created: Ralph Crane and the Stage Directions in The Tempest', Shakespeare Survey, Vol.36, 1983, pp.107-120. 35 act, transgresses the usual practical function of a storm to bring people to a situation or create the basic conditions for a plot. Instead, the storm in King Lear messes with the plot, alters the character’s actions and, as I shall argue below, assists in Shakespeare’s rewriting of the age-old story about an old king, a tragic representation of the powerlessness of human individuals and political systems in the face of meteorological violence.

1.3. The ‘Storm and tempest’ in King Lear

The cataclysm in King Lear is the dramatic meteorological event par excellence.

The storm in King Lear has duration; it crosses two acts and spans the better part of eight scenes. It is physical, imposing itself on the action with complete impartiality, and the characters have no choice but to respond. It is by no means an extension of Lear’s royal power, any more than it expresses the thoughts of any other single character, and it bears no warning of demonic presence. The storm’s material presence is reflected in the dialogue in various ways: Gloucester describes ‘the high winds’ (2.2.493), Kent curses 'Fie on this storm!' (3.1.45), the Fool jests that it is ‘a naughty night to swim in’

(3.4.109-110) and Poor Tom exclaims that he is ‘a-cold’ (3.4.82). Furthermore, although Lear calls for the thunder gods to ‘Strike flat the thick rotundity o’the world’

(3.2.7), no divine or demonic figures intervene to make the situation better or worse and, as such, there is no clearly divine or supernatural dimension. For all that, the storm may be said to sustain the conflict throughout the central acts, to bring the dramatic action to a climax and to turn the plot towards resolution.

The storm’s dramatic function is best illustrated by a brief exegesis of the plot, noting its ‘appearances’. It begins to rumble in 2.2, when the King, having rashly divided his kingdom and banished Cordelia and Kent, is in heated negotiation with

36 Goneril and Regan about his accommodation. The daughters refuse to take him unless he dismisses his hundred knights. Enraged, Lear refuses to capitulate to his daughters’ demands. At this crucial moment in the conflict, as relations between the parties collapse, the storm begins to thunder. Until this point, the conflict has been solely about

Lear’s knights, their behaviour and whether he has any need of so many when living with his daughters. The argument breaks out in 1.3 ('His knights grow riotous and himself upbraids us / On every trifle' [1.3.7-8].). But 2.2 is the scene in which it reaches a climax: Goneril and Regan refuse to negotiate any further and Lear runs out of options.

The storm is indicated in the play text by a stage direction, first published in the

1623 Folio, as Lear tries to explain why he needs his hundred knights: 'O, reason not the need' (2.2.456), he cries, insisting that humans need adornments like knights to mask their fundamentally beastly nature:

Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous; Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life is cheap as beast’s (2.2.456-459).

His self-justifications slide into a declaration of vengeance upon his daughters for depriving him of his right:

No, you unnatural hags, I will have such revenges on you both That all the world shall – I will do such things – What they are yet I know not, but they shall be The terrors of the earth! You think I’ll weep, No, I’ll not weep. [Storm and tempest.] I have full cause of weeping, but this heart Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws Or e’er I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad [2.2.470-478].

The storm is heard. The king resumes his rant and refusing to capitulate to his demands, leaves the stage.

37 This is a deceptively complex instance of dramatic plotting. It seems that we are being invited to conflate the storm with Lear in some way. If we were watching this moment in the theatre, the sound of the ‘Storm and tempest’ at this point might strike us as a cosmic expression of Lear’s power. But this is ultimately a dramatic ruse:

Shakespeare is playing a cruel trick on both his protagonist and his audience. The trick is in Shakespeare’s audacious exploitation of expectations. Lear and his audience are effectively led into misrecognising the storm as an extension of Lear’s power or his emotions: what Lear and his audience both want is the reward of vengeance from on high. Instead what Shakespeare provides is a pathetic old man and a storm that is entirely indifferent to his plight. In some senses both Lear and the audience already know this. Lear cannot quite imagine the nature of his vengeance (‘I will do such things

– what they are yet I know not’ (2.2.472-473)) and everything else, such as Cornwall’s cold response to Lear’s hysterics (‘Let us withdraw; twill be a storm’ (2.2.479)), suggest that the storm will probably not respond to Lear. But the complex interplay between convention, expectation, desire and the storm’s surprisingly cruel indifference confuses things. There is more to be said about Lear's situation here – his so-called madness, his refusal to let go of the entourage, the 'Storm and tempest' theatrical trick – and I shall return to these issues in Chapter Four. The most important point to be made at this stage is that while Shakespeare may wish us to see the storm as an extension of Lear’s power, the direction itself even completes the actor’s iambic pentameter as if it is literally an extension of Lear’s thought and word, but ultimately it is not.

Instead the ongoing tension between Lear’s desire for the storm to be on his side and the eyeless destructiveness of the storm itself is the source of the conflict that leads to the climax of the play. Lear exits the stage and goes out into the storm and the characters onstage watch him go and respond accordingly. Cornwall orders Regan,

38 Goneril and Gloucester to retreat indoors: ‘Let us withdraw, ‘twill be a storm’ (2.2.479).

Gloucester’s loyalty to Lear makes him hesitate: ‘Alack the night comes on, and the high winds / Do sorely ruffle; for miles about / There’s scarce a bush’ (2.2.493-495).

But finally Cornwall convinces him to retreat indoors: ‘Shut up your doors, my lord ‘tis a wild night … come out o’the storm’ (2.2.501-502).

The fact that the characters are exposed to the storm in 3.1, 3.2 and 3.4 is indicated in the dialogue and signalled in the first Folio at the beginning of each scene by the stage direction ‘Storm still’; 3.6 in the hovel has no such direction, but

Gloucester’s remark, ‘Here’s better than the open air’ (3.6.1), implies they are sheltering from the storm as it still rages outside. I even think of 3.7 as part of the extended ‘storm sequence’, simply because Gloucester’s eye gouging is a direct result of his aiding the king in the storm. In 3.1 we imagine Kent, and the Knight who joins him, to be somewhere out in the storm – the specific direction indicating they were on a

‘heath’ did not appear until Nicolas Rowe’s 1709 edition. Lear’s whereabouts are unknown, but the Knight, another lost soul, gives us a direct account of the storm's indifference to Lear when he tells Kent how Lear desperately tries to get the storm to respond to him:

Contending with the fretful elements; Bids the winds blow the earth into the sea, Or swell the curled water 'bove the main, That things might change or cease; tears his white hair Which the impetuous blasts, with eyeless rage, Catch in their fury and make nothing of; Strives in his little world of man to out-scorn The to and fro conflicting wind and rain. This night where the cub-drawn bear would couch, The lion and the belly-pinched wolf Keep their fur dry, unbonneted he runs, And bids what will take all (3.1.4-15).

In return, Kent reveals to the Knight that a greater strife is brewing, a civil war, because,

‘although as yet the face of it is covered’ (3.1.20), there are divisions between Albany

39 and Cornwall. In addition the French army is mobilized and Cordelia has returned to assist her father. We learn all this against the backdrop of the wind, thunder, lightning and rain of the storm. There are two main points to make about this scene. First, it interrupts the main action at its putative climax, in order to again point to the fact that this meteorological climax is not following convention: the storm is not on Lear’s side.

Secondly, Kent's account of what is happening offstage – the conflict between the two parts of the kingdom and the outbreak of civil war – is the principal impulse towards the resolution of the broader dramatic conflict. Chapter Five will undertake an analysis of the links between the storm and the war. But here it shall suffice to say that 3.1 is an important scene because it links the storm scenes to the broader political conflict and characterises the storm as so violent and powerful that no-one else, neither man nor beast, except the king, is prepared to expose themselves to its fury.

Act 3, scene 2 is the play’s best-known scene and Lear’s first face-to-face encounter with the ‘fretful elements’ (3.1.4). I shall return presently to the details of his attempted dialogue with the weather, but simply say here that the king attempts to control the storm (‘Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!’ [3.2.1]) and, realising that it is beyond his control, he swiftly moves to accusing the storm of conspiring with his daughters (‘with my two pernicious daughters join / Your high- engendered battle ‘gainst a head / So old and white as this’ [3.2.22-24]). Not convinced of this analysis either, Lear declares that the storm is yet to decide whose side it is on and implores it to do so (‘Let the great gods / That keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads / Find out their enemies now’ [3.2.49-51]). Meanwhile the Fool and Kent urge

Lear quickly to take shelter (Alack, bare-headed? / Gracious my lord, hard by here is a hovel: some friendship will it lend you ‘gainst the tempest' [3.2.60-62]). Lear accepts

Kent's offer ('Come, bring us to this hovel' [3.2.77]). The point to note here is that, from

40 2.2 to 3.2, all the characters see the storm as quite independent of Lear, while Lear struggles to understand precisely how the storm relates to himself and his situation.

Indeed, rather than being an uncomplex representation of Lear’s unique relation to the storm, his time in the storm is interrupted again by 3.3, in which Gloucester decides to go out and make sure the king is properly sheltered.

In 3.4, Lear is en route to the hovel, but his exposure to the elements is extended by constant distractions. On the one hand, Lear seems mad for not taking shelter, but, on the other hand, he is provoked into a radical reconsideration of his role, as a king, in the cosmos. He contemplates a king's position in relation to that of the wretched of the earth (‘Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, / That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm … O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this’ [3.4.28-30]), then turns his mind to a consideration of the human condition more generally (‘Why thou wert better in a grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this? Consider him well’ [3.4.100-102]). Having reached no satisfactory conclusions, he consults Edgar, now Poor Tom the Bedlam beggar, whom he addresses as a

‘Philosopher’: ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ (3.4.151). Once he has had a private word on the issues with which he has been grappling, Lear accepts the offer of shelter and invites Poor Tom to join him in the hovel.

Since it is the storm that obliges Lear to take shelter in a hovel, those scenes that

Shakespeare locates notionally inside the hovel should be considered part of the overall storm sequence. Lear enters the hovel at the end of 3.4. In 3.5 the storm is broken yet again for more exposition of Edmund’s plot against his father Gloucester. At the beginning of 3.6, in the hovel, Gloucester is pleased that Lear has finally taken shelter, even if inside a ‘hovel’ (‘Here is better than in the open air; take it / thankfully’ [3.6.1-

2]). The shelter has turned Lear’s attention away from the storm and his obsession with

41 his own condition, and his focus returns to his daughters’ ingratitude. Lear plays at avenging himself on Goneril and Regan by setting up a mock trial and arraigning the

‘joint-stools’, towards which he directs his anger. The Fool plays along, and Kent encourages Lear to sleep. The hovel scene ends with a short soliloquy from Edgar who realises that his own problem is not as bad as the King’s and decides to come out of disguise and confront his situation (‘How light and portable my pain seems now, /

When that which makes me bend makes the king bow, / He childed as I father’d! Tom, away!’ [3.6.106-108]). After this scene little mention is made of the storm. The meteorological event might have passed, but the conflict and violence in the kingdom escalates. The shocking arraignment of Gloucester and the old man’s appalling eye gouging thrusts us straight out of the hovel into 3.7 and the play’s broader political realities.

It is clear from this account of what happens in Acts 2 and 3 that the storm cannot easily be separated from the play’s central dramatic action. In the play text itself, the storm is present; its elemental nature is described in the dramatic poetry, it is created on stage and responded to by the characters in their words and gestures and as such, the indifferent storm becomes an integral part of the dramatic action. But it is not enough simply to observe that the storm breaks the conventions for the representation of the meteors and, paradoxically, sustains the dramatic action throughout this crucial part of the drama despite its indifference to the action. It is also necessary to ask why

Shakespeare may have involved the storm in such complex ways in the action. My next task, then, is to investigate the philosophical dimensions of this cataclysmic meteorological event in relation to the dramatic action, especially with regard to the early modern natural philosophy of meteorology. The Lear storm may reject the conventions for the theatrical representation of meteorological violence, but in Lear’s

42 question, ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ (3.4.151), Shakespeare also references and rejects the tradition of philosophical speculation in the face of meteorological violence.

1.4. The Purpose of the Storm

The storm is inseparable from the dramatic action, which is not to say that it takes sides with any of the participants. But Shakespeare leaves it up to us to speculate on the storm’s purpose, when, towards the end of his time in the storm Lear asks ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ (3.4.151). This question remains unanswered by the play and thus makes philosophical speculation in the face of meteorological violence an explicit part of the play’s text. Indeed, ambiguity with regard to the purpose of the storm is an old philosophical conundrum. In order to locate the storm within a tradition of such philosophising, I want here to briefly recount Gwilym Jones’s astute interpretation of

Lear’s question and then historicise the question by means of an overview of ways in which meteorology within the Aristotelian tradition intersects with philosophy and theology.24 I look specifically at the problem of ‘final causes’ in classical meteorology and propose that Lear is not asking about the origins of thunder, but wanting to know its

‘final cause’: 'What is the teleological function or purpose of this storm in the world right now?' In this respect we can understand the storm scenes as both generally referencing the long tradition of cosmic speculation in the face of meteorological violence, and also as a dramatic representation of the difficulties in constructing a coherent anthropocentric story about the random destruction caused by the meteors.

24 This section is indebted to Craig Martin’s 'Teleology in Renaissance Meteorology', a highly original critical analysis of the ideological dimensions of meteorology in his Renaissance Meteorology (2011), in which Martin assesses medieval and early modern scholars’ attempts to find a final purpose or aim for the weather in the world. 43 Gwilym Jones suggests that ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ is one of the ‘most pertinent and poignant lines of the play’25 for a range of reasons. He argues that the line itself could be thought about as ‘whose is the cause of thunder?’26 or for whom does the thunder rumble? By pursuing the answer to this very question, Jones argues that Lear is forced to reconsider his own beliefs about his place in the world. Furthermore, he argues that the question also provokes the audience to consider for whom the storm rumbles and reflect upon the drama through this stormy ambiguity.27 I think he is right, but these brief conclusions come at the very end of Jones’s analysis of the storm. He does not pursue the wider implications of this provocation for Lear or for the audience.

In contrast, this thesis considers the broader historical implications of Lear’s question.

Here the question is explored in natural philosophical terms for the purposes of understanding the storm in its early modern context, but come Chapter Four the full implications of this question for Lear and for the audience will be brought out through a close reading of the king’s journey through the storm.

Like all Aristotelian natural philosophy, meteorology was ‘causal’; in other words, mostly concerned with describing how meteors formed and for what purpose.28

This was distinct from early methods of weather prediction known as

‘Astrometeorology’, which were based on the superstitious interpretation of sunsets, animal behaviours and the like. It also differs from modern meteorology, which

25 Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms, p.95. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. p.96. 28 There is a branch of classical meteorology interested in weather signs and patterns but it is more or less distinct from the Aristotelian tradition. See L. Taub, 'Prediction and the role of tradition: Almanacs and Signs, Parapegmata and Poems', Ancient Meteorology, Routledge, London, 2003 pp.15-40. 44 explores the material constitution of the atmosphere in order to forecast the weather.29

In the Meteorologica Aristotle used his principle of ‘four causes’: material, efficient, formal and final. The material causes were the physical constituents of something, and the efficient cause the means by which matter was stirred up and brought into a particular formation. The formal cause was the final shape and form of matter itself.

The final cause was its goal or telos within the world.30 In the Meteorologica, Aristotle focuses largely on the material and efficient causes and says virtually nothing about the formal or final. He is silent on the formal causes because meteors are always incomplete and accidental formations, but his reasons for remaining silent on the final causes are more complex.

Although teleology or the notion of final causes in nature was one of the definitive features of Aristotelian natural philosophy, Aristotle reached no conclusions about the ultimate purpose of the meteors. This did not concern him, but he expected others to be concerned by a lack of certainty on such an important issue. In the Physics he asks:

Why should not nature work, not for the sake of something, nor because it is better so, but just as the sky rains, not in order to make corn grow, but of necessity? … [T]he result (of rain is) that the corn grows. Similarly if a man’s crop is spoiled on the threshing floor, the rain did not fall for the sake of this – in order that the crop might be spoiled – but that result just followed .… Such are the arguments which may cause difficulty on this point.31

Rain causes crops to grow, but also to be spoiled. For Aristotle, the creation or destruction of the crops could not be said to be the final cause of rain; they simply happened, as if by accident. Earlier I indicated the tradition of understanding the

29 For a detailed overview of modern meteorological scientific method, see C. Donald Ahrens (ed.), Meteorology Today: An Introduction to Weather, Climate, and The Environment, Thomson and Brooks/Cole, Belmont, (8th edn) 2008. 30 Aristotle, Physics, Ebooks, University of Adelaide Library, Adelaide, 2007. Retrieved from http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/physics/ 12 September 2011. 31 Ibid. 45 meteors as accidents, in line with Aristotle, but there was an equally strong tradition that tried to explain the meteors’ purpose within the cosmos in relation to the human condition. However, as Aristotle suspected, the question of the meteors' purpose in the world does ‘cause difficulty’ for natural philosophers. This ‘difficulty’, or what manifests as uncertainty, ambiguity and anxiety, was the locus of the philosophical, theological and political problem within the study of meteorology, from antiquity up to and beyond the seventeenth century. As providential signs, the meteors were unwieldy and irrational. How could one possibly imagine an order in nature if the meteors were both benevolent and destructive, and unpredictably so? How could one fit the meteors into a moral or theological paradigm if both the good and the wicked were harmed in a flood, or if both priests and murderers could be struck by lightning? These were the sorts of troublesome questions that were provoked by the meteors, the more so by violent and destructive ones like floods, earthquakes and, of course, storms.

There were no simple answers to these questions. Indeed, as Craig Martin has recently demonstrated in his Renaissance Meteorology: Pomponazzi to Descartes

(2011), the meteorological conundrum was not just taken up by a few esoteric scholars, but had a long and complex history. Philosophers from the Stoics and the Epicureans, through the Scholastic tradition, tackled the question. It was part of the Catholic eschatological imaginary and formed a key aspect of the theological debate across

Europe and England after the Reformation, taken up in various ways by Lutherans,

Calvinists and Catholics, as well as Pagans, Atheists and Sceptics. In order to explain the extraordinary variety of positions on the final causes of the meteors Martin activates the concept of ‘multiple Aristotelianisms’:32 ‘Aristotelian meteorology differed among courtly elites, Italian university professors, members of Catholic religious orders, and

32 The original concept is outlined by Charles B. Schmitt in Aristotle and the Renaissance, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1983. 46 Lutherans’.33 The multiple interpretations of Aristotle’s work are especially interesting on the issue of the meteors because he is silent on their ultimate purpose in the world.

On the complex question of final causes, meteorological natural philosophy bridges the gap between the physical and the metaphysical, in an attempt to understand God's work in the world.

A scholar to whom Martin makes special reference on this point is the sixteenth- century Catholic philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi, who almost draws an analogy between this meteorological conundrum and the mysteries of religious faith. He embraced the ambiguity of Aristotelian meteorology and marvelled at the idea of not knowing: according to Pomponazzi, ‘There are many things that seem bad to us, which are optimal, because we are ignorant of their purpose.’34 Pomponazzi was dismissive of philosophers who looked for answers to everything and argued that this unknown was essential for the practice of faith. For him, the fact that the final causes remain unknown gives rise to the problem of doubt, which, for a religious thinker, opens up the possibility of faith. While Pomponazzi did not search for answers, his analysis reveals the basic relationship between the meteors and theological questions. What was a likely

‘difficulty’ according to Aristotle was, for Pomponazzi, the problem of faith itself;

Pomponazzi saw within the meteors the origins of wonder and nothing else. But not all thinkers are as content with ambiguity as Pomponazzi, and the more politically motivated or evangelical writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries harnessed the fear of the unknown in order to make a clear statement of faith. As such the final causes of the meteors were written about by religious thinkers of all denominations to describe their particular strategies for managing their fears in relation to the unknown and unpredictable whims of God.

33 Martin, Renaissance Meteorology, p.16. 34 Quoted in Ibid., p.46. 47 Providentialist writings after the Reformation more or less exploited this meteorological conundrum in order to argue why individuals should subscribe to a particular religious denomination. This adds another layer of complexity to the problem of final causes for meteorology. It was not only a way of exploring one’s own faith, but was a way of differentiating one faith from another. In this respect, the meteors become entangled in the conflict between the different denominations of the Christian church after the Reformation. Alexandra Walsham argues that the interpretation of natural disasters represents ‘the cross-fertilization of an eclectic body of opinions and beliefs … to interactions between different layers of culture and to processes of adaptation and assimilation which go some way to explaining how Protestantism was implanted in

England’.35 I will show presently how Providentialist rhetoric harnessed the problem of final causes for the meteors to achieve some kind of immediate political or theological goal: to frighten, educate, convince or unite.

Involving the meteors in broader theological or political issues requires a convincing story. For example, the story of Martin Luther’s religious epiphany in 1505 was narrated as a powerful response to a violent thunderstorm: caught out in the storm, he exclaimed, 'Help me, Saint Anne, and I shall become a monk!'36 Luther survived and less than two weeks later he entered the Augustinian Monastery at Erefut. If there is more to this story than mythic appeal, then, as Gwilym Jones has dramatically asserted,

‘without one notable thunderstorm in 1505 … it is conceivable that the entire modern era of the west would have been radically different’.37 Nonetheless, myth or not, the storm can be ascribed this purpose for Luther and, at least metonymically, it can serve as a plausible catalyst for the Reformation. Furthermore, the myth has particular

35 A. Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England, p.70. 36 M. Mullett, 'Martin Luther's background, upbringing and education', Martin Luther, Routledge Historical Biographies, Routledge, London, 2004, (pp.20-50) p.37. 37 Jones, p.178. 48 resonances with what will come to be the definitive features of Protestantism: its iconoclasm and the notion of an unmediated relationship between God and the individual is manifest in Luther’s raw experience with the storm.38

Myth making about the meteors’ final causes was also an aspect of popular writing on weather events around the time when Shakespeare was composing King

Lear. The most popular and widely available sixteenth-century English book on the meteors was William Fulke's A Goodly Gallery with a Most Pleasaunt Prospect, into the Garden of Naturall Contemplation, to Beholde the Naturall Causes of All Kind of

Meteors (1563). This was an enduringly popular meteorological treatise based on geocentric cosmological principles and Aristotelian meteorology, and infused with

Fulke’s own Puritanical beliefs. The book had a wide enough readership to be repeatedly reissued and reprinted. The first reissue was in 1571, followed by another in

1602 with a slightly different title and title page. A second edition of the work was printed in 1634. A third edition was printed in 1639, reissued in 1640. The work was then reprinted again in 1654 with an entirely new title: Meteors: OR, A plain

Description of all kind of Meteors as well Fiery and Ayrie, as Watry and Earthy:

BRIEFLY Manifesting the Causes of all Blazing-stars, Shooting-Stars, Flames in the

Aire, Thunder, Lightning, Earthquakes, Rain, Dew, Snow, Clouds, Springs, Stones and

Metalls. This edition was also reissued in 1655 and 1670.39

In this text, Fulke made a definitive, albeit brief, theological point about the final causes of the meteors. Working clearly within the Aristotelian tradition, he explored the full range of meteors, including earthquakes and metals. But unlike Aristotle, he actually makes brief comment on the final causes:

38 The storm features in more explicitly religious accounts of Luther’s life. See, for example, D. Wilson, Out of the Storm: The Life and Legacy of Martin Luther, St. Martin's Press, New York, 2008. 39 Retrieved from English Short Title Catalogue, http://estc.bl.uk, 26 February 2013. 49 Concerning the formall and finall cause, we have little to saye because the one is so secret, that it is knowen of no ma(n) … The essentiall forme of all substaunces, Gods wisdome comprehendeth, the universall chiefe and last End of all thinges, is the glory of God. Myddle ends (if they may be so called) of these impressions are manifold profites, to Gods creatures, to make the earth fruitfull, to purge the ayre, to sett forth his power, to threathen his vengeaunce, to punyshe the worlde, to move to repentaunce: all the which are referde to one end of Gods eternall glory, ever to be praysed. Amen.40

There are similarities between Fulke and Pomponazzi; Fulke also claimed we could not know for sure the purposes of certain meteors. But rather than embracing the ambiguity itself as evidence of God's greatness, as Pomponazzi did, the Puritan Fulke interpreted the variability of the meteors as a form of direct instruction from God; when the meteors were benign, the faithful should be grateful, when violent, they should be afraid and repent.41

A violent weather event in 1613 stirred similar sentiments and opportunistic pamphleteers were quick to explain it in theological terms. Whereas Fulke’s commentary was a religious analysis of the broad natural philosophy of meteorology, pamphleteers responded to specific violent meteorological events within a particular geographical region and cultural context. Their pamphlets were designed to encourage those who had faith to remain strong and to convert to the faith those who were traumatized by such violent events. Despite what looked like random damage, the pamphleteers laboured to articulate the disaster in terms of God’s plan. As Walsham observed, such writings require a cleverly ‘telescoped time frame between wicked act and heavenly revenge … to enhance the teleological link between cause and effect’;42 or, in Aristotelian terms, the link between material, efficient and formal causes and the somewhat confusingly named ‘final cause’, which is, in contemporary parlance, the

40 W. Fulke A Goodly Gallery, 1571 (Orig. Publ. 1563), retrieved from Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyck.com 14 September 2011. 41 I provide an example of Fulke’s instructions below. 42 Ibid., p.76. 50 aim, purpose or the effect. There are three surviving pamphlets written in response to the wild weather experienced in England during the winter of 1613, less than a decade after Lear reached the stage. The pamphleteers sought to explain the destruction caused by the weather in terms of their particular theological agenda.

Take, for example, The last terrible Tempestious windes and weather. Truely

Relating many Lamentable Ship-wracks, with drowning of many people, on the Coasts of England, Scotland, France and Ireland: with the Iles of Wight, Garsey & Iarsey.

Shewing also, many great mis-fortunes, that have lately hapned on Land, by reason of

43 the windes and rayne, in divers places of this Kingdome (Illus. 7). By claiming to be

‘truly relating’ his events, the anonymous author implies that he is giving an objective description rather than making persuasive rhetorical argument; however, the pamphleteer’s main goal is actually to reason out the destruction caused by the weather for theological ends, and to promote his cause by encouraging repentance in his readers.

Like Fulke, he works to account for such unilateral destruction and suggest ways to respond to it:

For as God is infinite in his mercie, So is hee infinite in his Justice; and as our transgressions are numberless, so are the severall rods and punishments uncountable that God uses to inflict upon us, sometimes by weake meanse to accompalish great things, and confound the mighty; and sometimes by elementall causes, as fire, aire, water, and earth, hee shewes his universal power.44

This author’s remedy for displays of wholesale destruction is abject repentance in order to encourage God to show mercy on the population in future: ‘Then let us consider with our selves in What dangerous estates wee are in When the Almighty is offended with

43 Anonymous, The last terrible Tempestious windes and weather. Truely Relating many Lamentable Ship-wracks, with drowning of many people, on the Coasts of England, Scotland, France and Ireland: with the Iles of Wight, Garsey & Iarsey. Shewing also, many great mis- fortunes, that have lately hapned on Land, by reason of the windes and rayne, in divers places of this Kingdome, London, E. Alde and John Beale, 1613. Retrieved from Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyck.com, 12 August 2011. 44 Ibid., p.A2. 51

Illus. 7: The cover of The last Terrible tempestious windes and weather

52 us, and let us turn to the Lord though harty repentance … and then no doubt but God in his mercy will turne his favourable countenance towards us.’45 This is an act of interpretation. It seeks to turn the problem of the ambiguous final causes of meteorological violence into a clear moral story that corresponds with theological principles.

Turning to Shakespeare, we frequently find strategies used by our anonymous pamphleteer, deployed by a character for particular dramatic purposes. I am not claiming that these representations reflect the natural philosophy of meteorology, but rather, as in the case of the pamphleteer, a character's interpretation of the meteors as purposeful implies an idea about their final cause. As such, these examples are the offspring of the broader cultural debate about the meteors’ final causes. Shakespeare takes a sceptical, potentially humorous, approach to such meteorologically related myth-making in Julius Caesar (1599). In 1.3 Cassius, anxious to have Caska (sic) join with him in his plot against Caesar, draws on the thunder to justify his argument. ‘If you would consider the true cause’ of thunder, he says,

why, you shall find That heaven hath infused them with these spirits To make them instruments of fear and warning Unto some monstrous state (1.3.62-71).

The thunder joins the plot against Caesar when Cassius draws it into his particular narrative; for Cassius, the thunder is a sign that the state is rotten. Does Cassius really believe this is what the thunder signifies, or is it a manipulative strategy to strengthen his argument against Caesar? It depends on how we read Cassius' motives. But, whatever they may be, Cassius exploits the storm for his own ends; he ascribes a final cause to the thunder in order to try and convince another person of his point of view.

45 Ibid., p.D. 53 Either way, Shakespeare is clearly acknowledging a link between the contemplation of the final causes of the meteors and strategic political myth-making.

In The Tempest (1611) the representation of the 'final cause' or purpose of the tempest rests entirely in the hands of Prospero, who conjures up the sea storm in order to create the initial dramatic situation. After the storm-tossed opening scene, which ends with everyone on board abandoning ship to what they anticipate will be their certain deaths, we meet Prospero and his daughter. Her father comforts Miranda, who laments the fate of those who have drowned ('Tell your piteous heart / There's no harm done'

[1.2.14-15]), and explains at considerable length to her (and the audience) how they came to be on the island. Miranda remains unclear about the purpose of the storm: 'And now I pray you, sir– / For still 'tis beating in my mind – your reason / For raising this sea-storm?' (1.2.175-177). At this point Prospero puts her to sleep and his objectives for conjuring the storm begin to appear: Prospero ordered Ariel to 'perform' the tempest in order to deliver his brother Antonio, and split the characters up so that, over the course of the next few hours Prospero's revenge plot can unravel. By putting the 'author' of the storm ‘inside’ the play46 and keeping all the other characters ignorant of Prospero's ultimate control over their actions, Shakespeare reveals to us his own point of view on the dramatic purposes of storms. Here that purpose is to bring about Prospero's revenge; but metatheatrically the purpose of the storm is to create the conditions for the drama itself. The play’s title leads us to expect a play that’s all about a tempest, but on the one hand all we get is a relatively brief, but very noisy, opening to a three-hour-long entertainment. On the other hand it is the sine qua non of the action and renders it, up to a point, plausible. Indeed, what the storm in King Lear enables within the play, with the

46 For an exploration of the notion of Prospero as Shakespeare, with a focus on the actor's performance, see G. McMullan, 'The Tempest and the Uses of Late Shakespeare in the Theatre: Gielgud, Rylance, Prospero' in Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship and the Proximity of Death, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007, pp.318-353. 54 characters unclear as to the purpose of the storm but erroneously trying to make sense of it anyway, the tempest in The Tempest turns into metatheatre. In The Tempest, the characters other than Prospero and Ariel misrecognize their situation and act upon that misrecognition until the very end, except in The Tempest the fact that the characters misrecognise their situation is revealed to the audience. That Shakespeare reveals to us the ‘purpose’ of the storm in The Tempest, provokes us to consider the effect of its masking in King Lear.

Like the anonymous pamphleteer, Cassius and Prospero, Lear too tries to harness the storm for his own purposes, incorporate it into his personal narrative and exact revenge upon his daughters for their ingratitude. But he fails on all fronts.

Ultimately, he cannot use the storm to convince anyone of anything because the storm is indifferent to his plight: try as he might, he cannot get the storm to respond to his cries.

Lear's failure has something to do with his proximity to the event. Steve Mentz has called the storm 'Shakespeare's most direct interrogation of how a Providential storm feels against your skin'.47 In other words, the storm is physically present in the drama, not a rumble of a distant thunder somewhere off stage, and, as such, enables a poetic investigation of the sensory aspects of a meteorological act of God. Certainly, unlike

Cassius, Lear does not have the luxury of distance, and unlike Prospero, Lear does not have supernatural powers, to harness the storm to his own ends. But in King Lear there is more to the storm than just rain on the king’s body, indeed, the storm’s physical relationship to the king’s body is itself meaningful, as we shall see if we unpack the historical and philosophical content of his exposure to the storm and his inability to control it. From the end of 2.2 to the end of 3.4, Lear’s main objective is to incorporate the recalcitrant storm into his story and accommodate it into his worldview. So, when

47 S. Mentz, 'Strange Weather in King Lear', Shakespeare, Vol.6, No.2, June 2010, (pp.139-152) p.141. 55 he asks Poor Tom, ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ (3.4.151), he is effectively asking the audience to consider the storm’s purpose in this harrowing tale.

In 1966, William R. Elton argued that Lear’s question about the ‘causes of thunder’ was at once an expression of doubt and a quest for new knowledge. Elton focuses on this moment in order to deduce the character’s attitude towards the cosmos:

When Lear asks Edgar, whom he takes to be a ‘philosopher’, most likely a natural philosopher, ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ he is both reinforcing the impression we receive, at this juncture, of his failing faith in the gods and running counter to a convention almost universally identified with piety … Now, however, in his deeply revealing madness he expresses an attitude which more surely associates itself with doubt, for it is one which suggests both the abandonment of a strong religious and literary tradition, shared by both pagan and Christian alike ... and one which simultaneously in its probing of causation in the natural realm seeks for a cause beyond the divine.48

I agree with Elton. Lear's question is an expression of personal doubt and in both theological and theatrical terms, and by way of this question, Shakespeare breaks with a long tradition of clearly representing or describing the purpose of the meteors.

However, I want to make two additional points in regard to Elton’s specific reading of Lear's personal ideological position. The first is that the storm has a physical role in the creation of Lear's doubt. Lear’s faith fails, to be sure. But his doubt is not simply a passing emotional state. More specifically, it is the result of his direct confrontation with a physically violent, but cosmologically indifferent, storm; Lear is doggedly stubborn and firm in his opinion and worldview until he encounters the storm.

It is the storm’s material or cosmic indifference to Lear that gives rise to his doubt and breeds in him a wish to know its purpose, regardless of its complete indifference to his pleas.

48 W. Elton, King Lear and the Gods, Huntington Library, San Marino, 1966, p.201. 56 Secondly, Lear’s question makes the age-old meteorological question about the final causes of the meteors an active part of the dramatic action. However, the fact that

Lear is out in the storm for two scenes before he asks it implies that the storm has not yet supplied him with an answer. The storm does not affirm any of the characters’ cosmological pictures. While the conventional representation of thunder, lightning, storms and tempests implies a particular cosmological picture, the opposite is true for

Lear, who at the outset has a clear picture of the cosmos, only to see it break down during the storm. In the end, storm does not correspond with any pre-established world- order from Lear's perspective and no characters are vindicated by the storm. Indeed, to determine the purpose of the storm we need to turn, not to the heavens, but more specifically to the relations between the characters and the trajectory of the plot during the storm.

1.5. Shakespeare’s Idiosyncratic Storm

Storytelling in the theatre relies on what is immediately obvious, audible and visible, rather than what is buried beneath the surface of dialogue on the printed page.

Although it is impossible to know what would have been obvious to a theatre audience in 1606, it is likely that Shakespeare courted the audience’s attention by not delivering on the conventional promise of divine retribution delivered by the meteors. The absence of divine intervention might have been especially noticeable given that the protagonist is so vocal in his request for assistance. But cosmic indifference is not in and of itself a surprise; it is the circumstances that accompany cosmic cruelty that make it really meaningful. To understand the storm, then, we need to ask why Shakespeare needed to include this idiosyncratic meteorological event so prominently in his retelling of the old

Lear tale. As we shall see, Shakespeare not only breaks with the conventional

57 representation of meteorological violence, but with the assistance of the storm, he also reshapes the narrative trajectory of what was a classic historical story and folkloric fable.

The Lear story, that of an old parent with three children, the division of kingdom or lands and the ensuing conflict, is ancient, having derived from the folk tradition and existed in a similar form in many languages.49 Shakespeare based his version of it on the early British histories of Geoffrey of Monmouth (c.1136) and Raphael Holinshed

(1577), in which the folk tale is recounted as a historical legend about an ancient British

King Leir and his three daughters.50 Furthermore, the story was dramatised in The True

Historie of King Leir, written by an anonymous playwright and staged by the Queen's

Men sometime before its publication in 1605. We know that Shakespeare was familiar with the ‘histories’, that he may have seen the anonymous play on the stage and even read a printed copy of it while composing his own version.51 In other words, it is not unlikely that patrons of King’s Men would have had some familiarity with the basic story-line. So, along with my exploration of Shakespeare’s departure from the traditional representation of the meteors, it will be useful to consider his rearrangement of the well-known story.

Shakespeare made radical alterations to the trajectory of the Lear story as it appeared in all the known sources. The folk tales had the structural elements of division,

49 See K. Bullough, The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays: Volume VII, Major Tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Routledge and Keegan Paul, London, 1973, p.271; K. Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays, Methuen, London, 1977, p.271, and A. Young 'The Written and Oral Sources of King Lear and the Problem of Justice in the Play', Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol.15, No.2, 1975, pp.309-319. 50 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Anglicana, A. Thompson (trans.), 1718 and R. Holinshed, The Second Book of the Historie of England, 1587 in G. Bullough The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Routledge and Keegan Paul, London, Columbia University Press, New York, 1973. 51 The timelines around the production of King Lear and the publication of the source play are unclear. Muir, p.197, doubts that Shakespeare read the anonymous play, which could have been published, he writes, in the wake of the success of King Lear. 58 ingratitude and banishment, but concluded with reunion with the good child and redemption for the parent. In the histories, Lear reclaims the throne and dies peacefully many years later. The anonymous play ends, not with Leir’s death, but his restoration to the throne. Furthermore, although Shakespeare’s play is classified as a tragedy in the

First Folio, the title page of the Quarto calls it a ‘True Chronicle Historie’ (Illus. 8). Had his audiences gone along expecting to see the events of the drama played out in accordance with ‘historical truth’, they would have been disappointed. Indeed, the scale of the alterations Shakespeare makes to the chronicled history of King Lear is unprecedented in his work.

The first time a meteorological event occurs in the Lear story is in 1605, in the anonymous King Leir, rumbling at more or less the same point in the narrative as in

Shakespeare. But there are only a few rumbles, and they have a very clear purpose, to frighten Leir's would-be murderer into dropping his dagger and abandoning his orders to kill the King. Indeed, this thunder and lightning presage very different events from those in Shakespeare’s play: while the thunder in Leir signals a happy resolution of conflict, the equivalent moment in Lear signals a miserable ending of destruction and multiple deaths. The storm and all the major events that follow – the failed French invasion, the death of Cordelia; Lear’s failure to reclaim the throne, and his death from grief – constitute the major differences between the Shakespeare’s main plot and that of his principal narrative sources. The other major modification that Shakespeare makes to his source material, of course, is the addition of the parallel plot concerning Gloucester and his two sons.

59

Illus. 8: The title page of King Lear in the First Quarto, 1608

60 Shakespeare's version of Lear was, to borrow Kenneth Muir's words, a 'ruthless telescoping'52 of a range of sources: not only the basic narrative outline, but also its thematic content. It is widely agreed that Shakespeare drew on a collection of Tudor poems, A Mirror for Magistrates, Philip Sidney's Arcadia and Samuel Harsnett's pamphlet Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures.53 Bullough lists several more

'probable' sources,54 and Muir and others55 argue that he was heavily influenced by the work of Michel de Montaigne in John Florio's 1603 translation.56 And there is some debate about the nature of the contemporary social or political issues that may have impacted upon Shakespeare's retelling.57 Indeed, for Muir, the secondary sources, especially Harsnett's Declaration, are more significant influences on Shakespeare than the primary Lear story sources themselves.58 I want now to consider in some detail the significance of the storm as a key innovation in Shakespeare’s retelling of the old story.

First, I speculate on why Shakespeare would introduce such an extended storm event at

52 Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays, p.200. 53 These sources are documented by Bullough, and remain uncontested by Muir. 54 Bullough, The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, pp.269-420. 55 Laurie Shannon’s article ‘Poor, Bare, Forked: Animal Sovereignty, Human Negative Exceptionalism and the Natural History of King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol.60, No.2, 2008, pp.168-196, looks at the specific resonances between King Lear and Montaigne’s ‘The Apologie for Raymond Sebond’. Shannon does not specifically argue that Shakespeare would have read ‘The Apologie’, but rather looks at the conceptual similarities between Montaigne’s exploration of Sebond’s natural philosophy and the idea of the human animal represented in King Lear. The conceptual resonances with Montaigne are also explored in P. Holbrook, ‘Special Section: Shakespeare and Montaigne revisited’ in The Shakespearean International Yearbook, Ashgate, Farnham, 2006, pp.1-214. 56 Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays, p.206. 57 Bullough, The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, p.270, cites a contemporary court case: ‘In October 1603 an old servant of Queen Elizabeth, Brian Annesley, was somewhat in Lear's situation ... Annesley had three daughters, Grace ... Christian ... and Cordell. Christian played no public part in the affair, but Grace tried to get her father judged lunatic because he was senile and "altogether unfit to govern himself or his estate".' But, elsewhere, Andrew Gurr argues that Shakespeare’s play is a conservative response to James I's decision to unite England and Scotland: 'King Lear was the most explicitly loyal of all the plays Shakespeare wrote for the company's royal patron in the Jacobean period .... It was designed to uphold, at least on the face of it, James's policy of uniting his kingdoms by its demonstration of the effects of a divided kingdom.' The Shakespeare Company, 1594-1642, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp.182-183. King Lear as a conservative or subversive play in its day is an issue I shall grapple with in a later chapter. 58 Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays, pp.203-206. 61 this point in the story, and then, I suggest some ways in which an appreciation of his engagement with Harsnett enriches our understanding of the storm.

Given that the storm has traditionally been seen as a metaphor for Lear’s emotions, it is useful to underline the fact that the storm is not used for the purposes of making the old king a more emotional figure. From the earliest version of the Lear story, Lear is a distinctively emotional monarch, in thrall to his passions. Ejected by his daughters, rather than wandering around outdoors on a heath-like no-man’s land in

England, he sails to France to seek refuge with Cordellia (sic). Monmouth’s history narrates Lear’s emotional state during his period of exile. And, in a highly literary flourish, Lear is made to tell his sad tale in the first person:

(W)ith deep Sighs and Tears, (Lear) burst(s) forth into the following complaint. /‘O irreversible Decrees of the Fates, that never swerve from your stated Course! Why did you ever advance me to an unstable Felicity, since the Punishment of lost Happiness is greater than the Sense of present Misery? The Remembrance of the Time when vast Numbers of Men obsequiously attended me at the taking of Cities and wasting the Enemies Countries, more deeply pierces my Heart, than the View of my present Calamity, which has exposed me to the Derision of those who formerly laid at my Feet. O Rage of Fortune! Shall I ever again see the Day, when I may be able to reward those according to their Deserts who have forsaken me in my Distress.59

Monmouth’s Lear is an emotional old man. This fits with Shakespeare's characterisation of him out in the storm. But, crucially, no storm accompanies him on his journey to

France. Thus the storm as an indifferent obstacle, something that Lear is finally forced to grapple with, is an important feature of Shakespeare's redesign of Lear's hysterical passion.

I can only agree with Frank Walsh Brownlow, and Bullough and Muir before him, that Samuel Harsnett's Declaration is the most significant influence on

59 Monmouth in Bullough, p.314. 62 Shakespeare's version of the Lear story.60 Shakespeare’s engagement with Harsnett is revealed by the similarities between the dialogue of Edgar’s mad babbling in 3.4 and

3.6 and strange names given to devils in exorcisms recounted in the Declaration

(‘Modo’, ‘Mahu’, ‘Fratteretto’ and ‘Fliberdigibett’61): ‘The prince of darkness is a gentleman. Modo / He’s called, and Mahu’ (3.4.139-140), ‘This is the foul fiend

Flibbertigibet’ (3.4.113) and ‘Frateretto calls me, and tells me Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness’ (3.6.6-7). While Bullough believes that the Declaration ‘contributed greatly to [King Lear’s] atmosphere of trickery, deceit and the sense of a wickedness inexplicable by reason’,62 for Muir the verbal borrowings prove that Shakespeare read

Harsnett’s tract many times.63 But it is unlikely that Shakespeare would re-read a text simply to create a particular atmosphere or collect clever words; these might be a side- effect, but not the main factor. Just as Robert Stevenson argued many years ago, ‘Had his purpose been the gathering of such fiendish names and phrases as he actually did cull from it, then any number of other immediately contemporary books on demonology would have much better served his purpose.’64 What is more likely is that a larger concept expressed in the work appealed to him and he wanted to explore it dramatically and in greater detail. In my view Shakespeare's indebtedness to Samuel Harsnett comes to the fore in relation to Shakespeare’s use of the storm as a device of theatrical

60 F.W. Brownlow Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham, Associated University Press, Cranbury, London,1993, p.107. See also Muir, p.203 and Bullough, p.314. 61 ‘Modu … was a graund Commaunder, Mustermaister over the Captaines of the seaven deadly sinnes’, ‘The exorcist askes Maho, Saras devil, what company he had with him’ and ‘Frateretto, Fliberdigibbet, Hoberdidance, Tocobatto were foure devils of the round, or Morrice, whom Sara in her fits, tuned together in measure and sweet cadence’; S. Harsnett, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, James Roberts, Barbican, London, 1603, reprinted in Brownlow, pp.191-336. 62 Bullough, The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, p.301. 63 Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays, pp.207-208. 64 R. Stevenson, ‘Shakespeare’s Interest in Harsnet’s Declaration’, PMLA, Vol.67, No.5, 1952, (pp.898-902) p.900-901. 63 trickery; Harsnett's influence is manifest in the storm's indifference to the dramatic action and the theatrics that continue out in the storm despite its ‘eyeless rage’.

Shakespeare's interest in Harsnett can be seen in the way in which the indifferent storm calls into question the established relationship between a king's authority and the cosmos. The Declaration is a scathing critique of the Catholic Church's practice of exorcism as a strategy to frighten and indoctrinate a population; it questions the relationship between the Catholic Church and the heavens. It is an appeal addressed 'To the seduced Catholiques of England' to see through the theatrics of the exorcism.65

Exorcists, for Harsnett, are no more than actors, who have no capacity to engage with the divine, and their performances are ostentatious and potentially harmful. In order to trivialise the practice and undermine its authenticity, Harsnett compares an exorcism to a theatrical performance: ‘the Pope, and his spirits he sendeth in here amongst you, do play Almighty God, his sonne, and Saints upon a stage; do make a pageant of the

Church, the blessed Sacraments, the rites and ceremonies of religion.'66

What is especially interesting here, however, is the extensive reference Harsnett makes to theatrical effects, effects that can be related to the creation of violent weather onstage:

It served wonderous aptly ad terrorem et stuporem incutiendum populo [to stir up the people with astonishment and terror]: in steede of thunder and lightning to bring Jupiter upon the stage, by these dreadful frightful Exorcismes, thundring, clapping and flashing out the astonishing of Gods names, Jehovah, Tetragrammaton, Adonai, and the rest, to amaze and terrifie the poore people, and to possesse them with an expectation of some huge monster-devil to appeare. Who standing at gaze with trembling and feare, hearing the huge thunder-cracke of adjuration flie abroad, and no devils roare; and then seeing the Exorcist in a rage to throw away his

65 Ibid., p.195. 66 Harsnett in Brownlow, p.196. 64 thunder booke behind him, and hunt the devil with his owne holy hands.67

There are unmistakeable parallels between Harsnett’s scepticism towards the connection between the heavens and the exorcist and Shakespeare’s construction of a storm indifferent to Lear’s cries. In light of this, how are we to understand the relationship between Harsnett and Shakespeare, to what extent can Harsnett’s influence be seen in

Lear’s storm scenes, and how might this illuminate Shakespeare’s ultimate purpose with regard to the storm?

For Brownlow there is an analogical relationship between Harsnett and

Shakespeare: ‘Harsnett presents the exorcism as a terrifying storm, associated with the gods. It is also a storm of words addressed, like Lear's, as an adjuration to a concealed evil. Shakespeare, on the other hand, presents his storm as an exorcism, with King Lear as its interpreter.’68 For me, however, the relationship is not analogical, but rather complex, conceptual and critical. The idea that Shakespeare takes from Harsnett is the specific theatricality of authority. Harsnett does not, as Brownlow asserts, characterise the exorcism itself as a terrible storm, but rather he likens it to a theatrical storm constructed to terrify an audience with divine power. King Lear is not the interpreter of the exorcist’s feigned authority, as Brownlow argues elsewhere, but rather the character through which Shakespeare dramatises Harsnett’s criticism of the theatricality of the

Catholic Church’s authority. By this I mean, just as Harsnett’s Declaration calls into question the connection between the Catholic Church and the heavens, Lear’s experience in the storm calls into question the relationship between the king and cosmos. I am not arguing here that King Lear is a criticism of the Catholic Church in the same way that Harsnett’s declaration is; their relationship is more nuanced than that.

67 Ibid., p.287. 68 Ibid., p.114. 65 What I am arguing is that Shakespeare’s interest in Harsnett goes beyond the borrowing of names for the devil, and can be seen in the way in which the heavens are often theatrically called upon to trick either an individual or, as in King Lear, his protagonist and the audience. As I said earlier, Shakespeare is tricky when it comes to plotting the storm. Initially, neither Lear nor the audience are sure whether the storm is on his side or not, and Lear certainly hopes to be able to control the thunder and lightning. His failure to do so troubles the conventional links between the king and the cosmos. Lear initially interprets the storm as an extension of his power, but the storm proves him wrong and Lear has to adjust his understanding of his situation accordingly. From a metatheatrical perspective, Lear’s journey in the first few storm scenes is a deconstruction of his relationship with the cosmos: initially we expect the storm to be on his side, but these expectations are quickly shown to be false. In the same way

Harsnett’s Declaration criticises the links between the authority of the exorcist and the heavens themselves.

But where Harsnett aims to parody and subvert authority and Holinshed,

Monmouth and the anonymous play are conservative and celebratory of authority, in

King Lear Shakespeare creates an ambiguous situation. Harsnett aims to disarm authority and undermine the authoritarian order supported with such 'egregious impostures'. Conversely, in ultimately affirming Lear's position and restoring the moral order, the folktales, histories and the anonymous play offer no challenge to the status quo. What an audience will ultimately take away from King Lear is more difficult to discern. When I claim that the storm's meteorology is idiosyncratic because it breaks with convention, I am not necessarily suggesting that this makes the play altogether radical or subversive. Does Shakespeare further subvert the moral status quo by representing a King whose authority and identity is altogether undone by a storm? Or

66 does he ultimately uphold the status quo because we are ultimately moved to pity Lear, because the blackest villains die and two of Lear’s sympathisers, Albany and Edgar, survive?

The political position that Shakespeare’s play ultimately affirms is a complex issue. It is my contention that the moral status quo is radically undermined by the storm, but only complicated by the trajectory of the plot. The way in which we are led to identify with Lear's point of view, regardless of his ultimate fate, means that we end up sympathising with the moral position he represents. Furthermore, because of the flow of sympathies in the drama, the indifference of the cosmos is comparable to the ingratitude of Goneril and Regan. It is possible to argue that the daughters' ingratitude is made worse because of the cosmos's indifference, thereby strengthening our desire for the restitution of Lear and the status quo. But the political and moral ambiguity brought about by Shakespeare's modification of the conventional plot, and the unstable relationship between the new dramatic trajectory and the indifferent storm, is what marks King Lear as a product of 1606. To bring this chapter to a conclusion I want to examine how the cosmic ambiguity of the storm, which begets a certain moral or ideological ambiguity in the drama, sits within the broader cultural context of 1606.

1.6. The Storm Scenes as a Representation of the Cosmic Paradigm Shift

Shakespeare wrote King Lear amidst a period of great cultural transformation in

Britain and Europe: the decline of an old world paradigm and the rise of a new one.

Symbolic markers of this cataclysmic change are Martin Luther's nailing of his ninety- five theses to the door of Castle Church in 1517 and the publication of Nicolai

Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in Nuremberg in 1543. The intergenerational conflict in King Lear is widely understood as a dramatic

67 representation of this paradigm shift.69 The religious shift – the Reformation and

Counter-Reformation that produced conflict between different denominations of

Christianity – is evident in the various and incommensurable worldviews of the individual characters.70 Some scholars have read King Lear as a representation of the decline of feudal aristocracy and the rise of the nation state, evident in the conflict over

Lear's disenfranchised entourage of one hundred knights and the unclear social status of characters disenfranchised by the division of the kingdom at the end.71 Conversely, others have read it as a conservative backlash against such change; the King's divestment of responsibility but wish to retain all royal privilege in the division of his kingdom more specifically endorse absolutism and James I's 'Divine Right of Kings' outlined in The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598).72 Here I want to add to this argument by also suggesting that at turn of the seventeenth century, when Shakespeare came to write his version of an old story about an aged king bequeathing his power to the next generation, the cosmos itself was undergoing a generational shift. In other words, around the time King Lear was written, there was a shift underway from the closed classical cosmos, as represented in the images above (Illus. 4), to the open and infinite modern universe, the first stage of which was the widespread acceptance that

Earth is not at the centre of the cosmos. It is this cosmic change that has the greatest impact upon this analysis of the storm, which I will arrive at presently; firstly I will show how the play represents generational shift in cosmological terms.

69 J. Markels, 'King Lear, Revolution and the New Historicism', Modern Language Studies, Vol.21, No.2, Spring 1991, pp.11-26. 70 See W. Elton, King Lear and the Gods, The Huntington Library, San Marino, 1966. 71 P. Delany, 'King Lear and the Decline of Feudalism', PMLA, Vol.92, No.3, May 1977, pp.429-470. 72 R. Halpern, 'Historica Passio: King Lear's Fall into Feudalism' in The Politics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance and the Genealogy of Capital, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1991, pp.215-269; W. Dodd, 'Impossible Worlds: What Happens in King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1?', Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol.50, No.4, Winter, 1999, pp.477-507. 68 That King Lear is a drama about generational transition is explicitly stated in a scene in Gloucester's castle during the storm. In 3.3 Gloucester makes a big mistake, unguardedly confiding in Edmund that he is going out into the storm to assist Lear. He asks Edmund to keep his plan secret. ‘Say you nothing’ (3.3.8), requests Gloucester, ‘If

I die for it – and no less is threatened me – the King my old master must be relieved’

(18-19). Once Gloucester has gone out, Edmund confirms for the audience what they may already suspect: he is not on his father’s side and he will instantly reveal

Gloucester’s secret to those who may kill him for aiding the King. To justify this potentially parricidal action, Edmund argues, ‘This seems a fair deserving, and must draw me / That which my father loses, no less than all. / The younger rises when the old doth fall’ (3.3.23-25). He deserves to benefit from his treachery, he says, and after it is inevitable that the young will rise when the old fall. While this moment has a very specific function in relation to the plot against Gloucester, Edmund’s claim reflects the basic dramatic action of King Lear, in which we witness the transition of a kingdom from one generation to another; the young desperate to take on new responsibility and the old, though needing to rest, reluctant to relinquish power completely. Whether the play supports the older or younger generation remains unclear. On the one hand, it represents the inevitability of change and the tragedy of our mortality. On the other, just because he is the most 'modern' of all the characters, Edmund’s modern ways are unlikely to attract our sympathy.

Shakespeare inflates this generational drama by making the conflict not only between individuals and their basic human political situation, but also between individuals with fundamentally different perspectives on the entire world. In other words, it is not just a play about two generations, but about two generations in which individuals subscribe to incommensurably different cosmological points of view. This is

69 something written explicitly into the dialogue of the play. These worldviews become part of the dramatic action in the way they articulate the characters’ intentions. Lear is prone to invoking the heavens in order to support his particular earthly situation. When banishing Cordelia, he calls upon 'the sacred radiance of the sun, / The mysteries of

Hecate and the night, / By all the operation of the orbs / From whom we do exist and cease to be' (1.1.110-113), fully expecting unconditional approval for his actions. But the unravelling of the plot is also the unravelling of Lear's confidence in his worldview.

The exchange between Gloucester and Edmund in 1.2 confirms the cosmic register of conflict in the play. Edmund deceives Gloucester into thinking his legitimate son Edgar is conspiring against him; the success of his plot hinges on their different worldviews. Gloucester is superstitious: 'These late eclipses in the sun and moon / portend no good to us. / Though the wisdom of Nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects' (1.2.103-105). Gambling on the strength of Gloucester's superstitions: Edmund hopes that his father will blame everything on the stars:

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on' [1.2.118-126].

Edmund is right. His father asks no questions, and in celebrating his own cunning

Edmund exposes his worldview; he is a sceptic with a rational and disenchanted attitude to the world.

This cosmic dimension of Lear is a well-worn scholarly path; so much so that it

70 is not the fact of the play’s cosmic register that is the subject of debate, but the precise philosophical idea and cosmological model represented by each character. Two interpretations of the characters’ cosmic attitudes are offered in John Danby's

Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear (1948)73 and Elton's King Lear and the Gods (1966). While both scholars align the characters in a similar way – King

Lear and Gloucester as opposed to Edmund, Regan and Goneril – their conclusions are very different. Elton ultimately aligns the attitudes of the characters with a classical paradigm, whereas Danby reads a nascent modernity. Elton classifies Lear's belief as initially aligned with Gloucester and pagan superstition and ultimately with the notion of a deus absconditus, a hidden god. Conversely, he argues that Edmund, Regan and

Goneril are pagan atheists. He classifies them as atheists, because they emphasise

'naturalism to a maximum degree, with a minimising of supernatural imposition, unless it should immediately accrue benefit to the natural self'.74 Elton acknowledges that often such readings become confused with more modern worldviews such as

Machiavellianism, but he locates Lear predominantly within an ancient cosmos, whereas Danby emphasises Lear's ‘nascent modernity’. For him the play presents a range of ideas about nature, which ultimately correspond to a new worldview: Lear’s ideas are similar to those of Bacon and Hooker, while those of Edmund and the daughters reflect those of Hobbes.

But as yet this indeterminate cosmic drama, alongside the religious, social and political drama, has not been linked in any large-scale and material way to the storm. In other words, both Elton and Danby identify particular aspects of individual characters' attitudes expressed in the storm scenes, but the storm itself is not considered as related

73 J. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear, Faber and Faber, London, 1948. 74 Elton, King Lear and the Gods, p.116. 71 to this cosmological conflict. Yet the most meaningful dimension of the meteors in

Shakespeare’s day was their perceived literal connection with the cosmos. As I described above, the geocentric cosmos literally imagined a direct link between the heavens and the meteors. The storm is integral to the conflict between the characters because it stands apart from and independent of any character’s particular cosmology.

So while an audience may agree morally with Lear and Gloucester, or ideologically with Edmund (or vice versa), none of the characters have their worldview vindicated by the storm itself. Lear assumes that the storm will behave as he wants it to; when it does not, he frantically tries to search out its meaning. Gloucester acts without question, puts his faith in the stars, only to have his eyes gouged out. And Edmund's attempt to play the system fails too. They act in accordance with their worldview and the storm neither approves nor disapproves: this storm is indifferent to all their attitudes.

So, what cosmological or moral-political order does the storm itself affirm? That there is great disparity between Elton’s and Danby's conclusions with regard to the historical particularities of Lear's cosmological drama is our first clue to the answer to this question. Elton explores the Lear cosmos in largely classical terms, while Danby emphasises modern ideas about nature. What this suggests is that Shakespeare has constructed a fundamentally ambiguous cosmological framework for his 'most cosmic drama'. But Shakespeare’s failure to paint for us a clear cosmic picture is, arguably,

King Lear’s greatest strength.

So before moving on to looking at the storm on stage, I want to propose two answers to the play's most important, philosophically complex and ambiguous question:

'What is the cause of thunder?' First, there is unequivocal textual evidence that the storm works against the characters’ desires: it is 'impetuous', 'eyeless' and 'pitiless'. The storm

72 is neutral; it is of an order, whether it be natural, cosmological or divine, that transcends all human agency. If the storm can be said to have any anthropocentric 'purpose' at all – and this storm does, because it operates in the service of a human drama – then that purpose is to create a force of resistance in that drama, a force of resistance against human desires and political paradigms. By virtue of its resistance to the things we most want, it reveals humans as weak, powerless, mortal and animal. The significance of this aspect of the storm, for the characters and the play as a whole, I will explore in Chapters

Four and Five.

The second answer to the question ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ is a theatrical one. The question provokes another answer when posed in the theatre, as we watch the old King rail against the elements. Given the moral neutrality of the material world itself, and ambiguity brought about by the storm’s indifference, the play’s actor- manager or director can perhaps decide for us what the cause of thunder actually is, at least in their production. A production may be shaped in Lear's favour, characterising him as a misunderstood hero, or else underline his madness, misogyny and decrepitude.

In these instances the purpose of thunder will be to test the hero's strength or else to stress his fundamental weakness. Further, as Gwilym Jones claimed at the end of his analysis of King Lear, ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ is a question that demands ‘the audience react to, understand through, the event of the storm.’75 Even so, Jones does not explore the variety of strategies for staging that frame the reaction and understanding, but in Chapter Two and Three I shall look at some of the principal stagings of the storm since 1606 and the ways in which the role of Lear has been performed in order to show the range of theatrical answers to the question, 'What is the cause of thunder?'.

75 Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms, p.96. 73 1.7. The Changing Significance of the Storm

If the storm is the sine qua non of King Lear, the element without which the whole is incomplete, why is it that we do not 'read' the materiality of the storm as central to the dramatic action? Why is it that the abstract poetics of the storm have taken precedence over its ominous material and physical presence? The French philosopher

Michel Serres refers to the period between the late seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries as that of the 'erasure of the meteors', and has suggested that since the eighteenth century 'meteorology [has become] the repressed content of history'.76 S.K.

Heninger describes the changing cultural significance of the meteors slightly differently: ‘rain falls on the New Atlantis for reasons quite different from those which explained why divine grace showered the City of God’.77 What occurs between 1606 and the end of the seventeenth century is that the meteors literally fall from grace: they cease to be signs from God, the source of all meaning, and start to signify a total lack of meaning. By the twentieth century prominent philosophers such as Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes refer to the meteors as signs of ‘boredom’78 and ‘nothing’79 respectively. On a broader cultural level, changes in cosmology, religion, and the development of scientific method, transform the cultural value of the meteors to such a degree that they lose their physical connection with broader questions of philosophy, religion and political order, thus making any reference to them symbolic or metaphoric, rather than direct, literal, and at the very least, metonymic.

76 M. Serres, La Distribution, Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1977, p.229, and The Birth of Physics, Clinamen Press, Manchester, 2000, p.90. 77 Heninger, Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, p.3. 78 W. Benjamin, ‘D: Boredom, Eternal Return’ in The Arcades Project, (orig. publ. 1982), Rolf Tiederman (trans.), Library of Congress, Washington, 1999, p.101. 79 R. Barthes, ‘Pierre Loti: Azyiade’, New Critical Essays, (orig. publ. 1980), University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1990, p.81. 74 The changing cultural significance of the meteors in the seventeenth century can be best illustrated by example. Fulke writes that ‘[t]he first and efficient cause [of meteors] is God, the worker of all wonders, accordinge to that testimony of the

Psalmist, which sayeth Fier, Haile, snowe, yse, wynde and [thunder]stones, do his will and commandment’.80 The psalmist aside, Fulke's meteorology was within the geocentric cosmos in which there could be a direct link between God or the gods, and the weather: the meteors are providence. Less than a century later, Francis Bacon imagined something quite different for the future of meteorology. In The New Atlantis

(1627) Bacon, a great admirer of the new cosmologies of Copernicus, Bruno and

Thomas Digges, imagined ‘great and spacious houses where we imitate and demonstrate meteors; as snow, hail, rain, some artificial rains of bodies and not of water, thunders, lightnings’.81 Bacon’s vision is for a new science to understand the meteors, that can no longer be understood as direct signs from God. Fulke describes the weather as an expression of God’s will. Bacon, on the other hand, imagines a future world in which the causes are unknown but discoverable through observation, experimentation and measurement. Scientific methodology of this kind is only in its embryonic stage at the time Shakespeare is at work on King Lear. For although the invention of Galileo's air thermometer is dated at 1597, for example, these inventions do not begin to influence culture until the establishment of institutions such as the Royal

Society in 1660. Further, Hook's description of 'A METHOD For making a History of the WEATHER' is not published until 1667, in Thomas Spratt's The history of the Royal

Society of London for the improving of natural knowledge, and most instruments that

80 Fulke, quoted in Heninger, p.21. 81 F. Bacon, The New Atlantis, (orig. publ. 1627), Ebooks, University of Adelaide Library, Adelaide, 2009, retrieved from http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/bacon/francis/b12n/ 10 July 2011. The New Atlantis was originally published in Latin in 1624 and published in English translation three years later. 75 will become integral to modern meteorology are not invented until the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries.

Cosmology changes at the same slow and ungainly pace as meteorology.82 In

1606, although the radical cosmologies of Copernicus and Giordano Bruno were in

English translation by then, and the Ninth Earl of Northumberland held them in his personal library, the degree to which they were widely read and known in England is unclear. We know that Bruno scandalised scholars at Oxford in a series of lectures, the first of which was in 1583.83 Francis Bacon declared his interest in Brunian cosmology by 1608.84 Bacon’s major treatise on the scientific method, the Novum Organum or New

Organon, called for the end to superstition in relation to the meteors:

Natural philosophy has, in every age, met with a troublesome and difficult opponent, superstition, a blind and immoderate zeal for religion. For we see among the Greeks, those who first disclosed the natural causes of thunder and storms to the yet untrained ears of man were condemned as guilty of impiety towards the gods.85 Even so, his advocacy of the scientific method because of superstitions surrounding the meteors was not published until 1620. It was not until 1621 that John Donne wrote: 'The new Philosophy calls all in doubt, / The Element of fire is quite put out; / The Sunne is lost, and the'earth, and no mans wit / Can well direct him where to looke for it'.86

Furthermore, as Craig Martin argues in Renaissance Meteorology, meteorology was one

82 For studies of the slow historical transition from the classical cosmos to the modern universe, see A. Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1957 and T. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy and the Development of Western Thought, Vintage Books, New York, 1959. 83 'Giordano Bruno's Conflict with Oxford' in Lull and Bruno: Collected Essays: Volume 1, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, Boston and Henley, 1982, pp.134-150. 84 H. Gatti, The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge, Routledge, London and New York, 1989, p.35. 85 F. Bacon, The New Organon, (orig. publ. 1620) Ebooks, University of Adelaide Library, Adelaide, 2009, retrieved from http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/bacon/francis/organon/ 10 July 2011. 86 J. Donne, 'An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary', (orig. publ. 1621), in John Donne: The Complete English Poems, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971, p.276. 76 Illus.9: The heliocentric cosmos of the last bastions of Aristotelian natural philosophy, relatively unscathed by the cosmic scandals of the seventeenth century.87 Needless to say, the relationship between heliocentrism and meteorology is not exactly central to the broader cosmic paradigm shift. Thus, it is unlikely that Shakespeare was making any direct link between the

87 Meteorology is relatively slow in terms of developing into a clear branch of science, Martin says, arguing in Renaissance Meteorology (pp.148-155) that traces of Aristotelian meteorology are evident in the meteorological writings of Descartes. It is well beyond the scope of this thesis to undertake a full exploration of the precise rate of historical decline in use of the Aristotelian meteorological model. 77 implications of the new cosmologies on meteorology per se. On the other hand,

Edmund’s scepticism suggests that the link between cosmology and meteorology is so logical that the cultural significance of meteorology will necessarily have to change with the uptake of the new cosmologies.

My reason for investigating this cosmic dimension of King Lear in such historical detail is that it is my proposal that the irreversible change to the broad cultural significance of the meteors that occurs in the late seventeenth century is brought about by the new cosmology. What thwarts our capacity to read the storm as a radical event force within the drama is the cosmological change that has taken place between

Shakespeare's day and our own. Post-Copernican cosmology enacts a fundamental and physical break between the heavens and the sublunary realm and, more so than the development of the modern scientific method, I argue this cosmological break has a profound conceptual impact on the cultural imaginary around the meteors. Consider the late sixteenth-century image of the heliocentric cosmos (Illus. 9), in comparison to those discussed earlier (Illus. 4 & 5). Thomas Digges’s geocentric cosmos visualises a literal and logical connection between the heavens and the meteors, but the gradual rise of heliocentrism means that that link is broken, and that, at the same time, the meteors lose their centrality in that model. I am not suggesting that people looked at a drawing and changed their thinking about the weather overnight, but that the meteors assume a different cultural and philosophical value in accordance with the broader cosmological changes. The fact that these cosmological changes took root meant that we had to restructure entirely the way in which we understood the relationship between the meteors and the cosmos.

This is certainly not to argue that King Lear is a prophetic expression of cosmological change. But what I do contend is that Shakespeare captures the specific

78 cosmological shift incidentally, by exploring the ambiguity and doubt surrounding the relationships between king, kingdom and cosmos nascent in Britain in 1606. It is by virtue of its lack of closure that the play represents the cosmological conundrum, a conundrum resulting from the storm's neutrality. What comes next? What future awaits, what kingdom do those left standing at the end of this tragedy inherit? What is the moral or political order of this new, possibly modern, cosmos? What is the ‘final cause’ of thunder in a new world order? If King Lear is prescient of a modern cosmos, it is not because Shakespeare has some extraordinarily futuristic vision of what will happen in the years to come, but simply because he has captured so completely the ambiguity of cosmological thinking in 1606.

Furthermore, in conclusion, I would suggest that this cosmic openness is one of the reasons why King Lear has become one of the master texts of Western modernity.

The storm is neutral and yet structures this drama; as such the character’s experiences in the storm can be read as explorations of the existential questions we may have about the human condition in the modern cosmos. Lear does not have an anachronistic cosmological framework, but rather the play itself is cosmologically open and able to be updated and remade for each generation. This chapter highlighted the significance of the storm’s meteorology in an early modern context, but this meaning does not remain static over time. Chapters Two and Three will illustrate how the storm has been imagined and represented on stage and chart the gradual changes in the storm’s significance over time.

79 Chapter 2

The meteorological storm, 1606–1892 Theatre technology, popular spectacle and Nahum Tate

In King Lear Shakespeare played with the conventional representation of a storm, which enabled him to explore the relationship between king, kingdom and cosmos. But critics have long overlooked the meteorological dimension of the storm. In contrast, this thesis aims to reactivate the storm’s materiality by re-evaluating the play in terms of the great meteorological event that I argue is its crux. The analysis presented in the previous chapter revealed the storm as one of Shakespeare’s key innovations in his retelling of the old Lear story. Moreover, the storm was shown to be a physical presence in the drama, with radical cosmological and historical implications because of its material indifference to the human conflict. Although the storm’s indifference to the drama was entirely radical for audiences in the early seventeenth century, it seems to have lost such significance over time. Chapters Two and Three thus explore this shift in the critical interpretation of the central event in the drama: why and how has a radical meteorological event that challenged the very principles of the cosmos become ubiquitously understood as a poetic symbol referring to some other aspect of the play?

The changing significance of the storm was slow and cumulative; it is beyond the scope of any one study to fully account for this shift in broad historical terms. Such a study would have to encompass the processes of modernisation – imperialism, industrialisation, secularisation and enlightenment – that mark the last four centuries of

Western history. Thus, to observe the storm’s morphing from meteorological event to chaotic symbol, the following chapters narrow the focus and provide an overview of the stage history of King Lear, paying close attention to the construction of the storm on stage. The storm scenes provide the greatest creative and technological challenge for a

80 theatre artist in the staging of King Lear. In this respect, the staged storm is an ideal site for mapping how the meaning of the storm is remade over time because it is a theatrical event that requires significant innovation to be staged. To this end, the next two chapters examine the evolution of the storm’s significance in the theatre.

Jonathan Bate stressed the importance of stage representation in critical interpretation of Shakespeare’s work: ‘insofar as (Shakespeare) had a theory or leading idea of his own, that theory or idea was inextricably linked to … theatrical performance.’1 Indeed, the storm – Shakespeare’s ‘leading idea’ in King Lear – really only exists in theatrical performance. The only textual evidence of the storm lies in the characters’ reactions and in the stage directions. Although readers and literary scholars can virtually ignore it on the printed page, the Folio stage directions ‘Storm and tempest’ and ‘Storm still’ present a challenge to theatre directors and designers. They presented a challenge to the King’s Men in 1606 and have presented perhaps an even greater challenge for subsequent generations of theatre companies, as the technological resources of stagecraft have become more sophisticated.

Chapter Two explores the ways in which the storm was represented on the

British stage between the early seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries (i.e., 1606–

1892), a period I regard as the age of ‘the meteorological storm’ in which the storm was represented as a meteorological event. Prior to the nineteenth century, however strong the ambition to replicate real weather conditions and put ‘real’ thunder, lightning, wind and rain of the storm on the stage might have been, it had to wait upon technological progress. That progress was made slowly, and at an uneven and unpredictable pace during this period. This chapter provides an overview of the way in which physical and

1 J. Bate, 'Shakespeare's Foolosophy' in G. Iopollo and R.A. Foakes (eds), Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honour of R.A. Foakes, University of Delaware Press, Newark, 2000, p.17. 81 technological change – from the development of the playhouse and stage scenery to the introduction of electric lighting – significantly impacted upon the staging of the storm as a spectacular event. While changing aesthetic styles inevitably differentiated one stage storm from another, here I regard technological progress as the main catalyst of change in relation to the representation of the storm onstage. Indeed, if we view the years 1606–1892 as a single epoch rather than as a series of changing artistic periods, each generation can be seen to build on the technology and skills of the previous, gradually working towards the peak moment when theatrical storms become truly astonishing spectacular and dynamic events. Although the cosmic dimension of King

Lear may not have resonated with theatre audiences in 1892 in the same way as it might have done in 1606, the storm’s materiality and its centrality to the play cannot be missed.

The chapter begins with a consideration of what the storm would have looked like on the stages of The Globe and Blackfriars in the early seventeenth century and ends in 1892, with the last British staging before the advent of cinema in 1895. The productions I have selected to explore – on the British stage – have been chosen for two key reasons. First, as mentioned earlier, the aesthetic goal in this period was to represent the storm as the well-known physical event and the meteors as meteors. In many ways little variation is seen in the methods used to represent specific meteors during this period: for example, fireworks were used for lightning in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Therefore, I have selected productions in which significant changes can be seen in staging the storm. Second, reliable records of specific productions, especially the early ones, are not always available, and even when they are they lack sufficient technical detail. In many cases I have had to create an impression of the storm on stage based on the prevalent relationship between aesthetic style,

82 technology and architecture. Therefore, I have chosen productions that are both historically significant and, where possible, well documented. There are several reasons for ending this chapter with the 1892 production: in particular, prior to the advent of cinema in 1895, spectacular theatre was a popular art form, and storms were among the more popular spectacles that theatre offered. Cinema changes the theatre’s function in this regard and the storm changes along with it. But throughout this period, the audience’s desire for spectacle was one of the chief motivating factors in the creation of a technically complex and visually exciting meteorological storm.

This chapter will concentrate on nine productions. Rather than beginning with

Lear’s first recorded performance, at the Whitehall court playhouse on 26 December

1606, it is more critically interesting to consider the storm first at the Globe, on the

King’s Men’s large outdoor stage (where it very likely played in early 1607), and then at Blackfriars (1609?).2 I then move to look at Nahum Tate’s play as the Duke’s Men might have staged it at Dorset Gardens in 1681. The figure of actor-manager David

Garrick, who played in Tate’s Lear between 1742 and 1776, dominates the eighteenth century, so I focus on constructing an idea of what his productions of the play might have been like. By the nineteenth century, Lear’s production history becomes more complicated. First, the storm as spectacle reaches its peak, tending to overwhelm other aspects of the production. Secondly, we start to see productions of King Lear outside

England: New York in 1820 and Sydney in 1837, for example. The first New York production was by an English touring company and the version of King Lear staged in

Sydney was Nahum Tate’s. Although an exploration of the play on other nation’s stages would add nothing to my argument, it is nevertheless important to be aware of how

Shakespearean performance colonised other nations’ stages as the British Empire

2 There is scope for future research into storms and their presentation in the court masque, but it has little bearing upon the specific argument in this thesis. 83 extended itself. Finally, Shakespeare’s play was restored to the English stage in 1838, an important moment in nineteenth-century stage history. I have selected three productions that illustrate the complex stage history of King Lear in nineteenth-century

London: Edmund Kean’s (Drury Lane, 1820/23), William Charles Macready’s (Covent

Garden, 1838) and Henry Irving’s (Lyceum, 1892).

A crucial complicating factor in this overview is, of course, that between 1681 and 1838 – over half the period covered in this chapter – Nahum Tate’s adaptation The

History of King Lear supplanted Shakespeare’s King Lear on the stage. Therefore I intend to begin by noting the differences between Tate’s storm and Shakespeare’s, with regard to the ways in which plot and character relations impact upon the storm’s general significance. A close reading of Tate’s play reveals a significant shift away from the cosmological dimensions of Shakespeare’s drama. Details such as Tate’s notorious romantic ending apart, I argue that it is the difference between the two plays in this cosmic regard that has the greatest impact on the meaning of the storm in the period covered in this chapter. Furthermore, the intervention of Tate’s adaptation in the long eighteenth century means that by the time Shakespeare’s play is fully restored to the stage in 1838 the cosmic drama enabled by the storm itself – the storm’s radical break from dramatic convention compelling an old-world, classically modelled king to undergo a radical change in worldview – has little to no cultural currency. Indeed, despite the strong desire to restore Shakespeare’s play to the stage, making sense of the storm’s ‘eyeless’ rage is a real issue for modern critics and artists. As such, in the fifth section of this chapter, I will rethink Lamb’s early nineteenth century reflection on

Shakespeare’s King Lear in terms of the problems it foreshadows in making sense of the storm on stage in a different historical time. Lamb claims that the play is

‘impossible’ to stage because the ‘contemptible machinery’ used to create the storm

84 dwarfs Lear. In contrast to various extant interpretations of what Lamb means when he says the play is ‘impossible’ to stage, I argue that it is specifically due to the lack of comprehension of the cosmic dimension of Shakespeare’s play, brought about by changed historical circumstances, that leads Lamb to these conclusions.

2.1. Nahum Tate’s Storm

So radical was Nahum Tate’s adaptation of King Lear that my earlier analysis of

Shakespeare’s play needs equally radical revision when it comes to understanding the storm on the Restoration and Georgian stages. It is important, therefore, to highlight the differences between the two storms as they feature in the plays as literature before turning to any consideration of Tate’s text in the theatre.

Throughout the 150 years during which Tate’s play kept Shakespeare’s dramatic plot off the stage, some of Shakespeare’s dialogue was restored. Many actor-managers still associated their production with the Bard anyway.3 For example, Garrick’s 1742 production was predominantly Tate’s, but it was billed as ‘KING LEAR with restorations from Shakespeare’.4 The tradition of reading Shakespeare in tandem with the stage history also prevented Shakespeare's play from disappearing entirely during this period.5 Those who wrote about King Lear – critics such as Samuel Johnson,

Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt – were familiar with both versions of the play and

3 On the development at this time of the cultural phenomenon of ‘Shakespeare’s genius’, see G. Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991; M. Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992; J. Bate The Genius of Shakespeare, Picador, London, 1997. 4 K. Burnim, David Garrick: Director, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1973, p.144. 5 For specific analysis of Shakespeare’s printed works and the practice of reading the plays as literature see A. Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007; A. Thompson and S. Roberts, Women Reading Shakespeare, 1660-1900: An Anthology of Criticism, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1997; L. Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, Cambridge University Press, 2003. 85 commented on the differences between the two. Dr Johnson, whose famous preface to

Lear (1765) unfortunately does not contain comment on the storm itself, lamented the fact that London audiences, himself included, did not want to see Shakespeare’s tragedy:

In the present case the publick has decided. Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add any thing to the general suffrage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.6

Though Shakespeare’s work did not entirely disappear between 1681 and 1838, Tate’s influence did not end with Macready’s restoration of Shakespeare’s play in 1838: Doris

Adler notes that the cutting of lines and the re-ordering of scenes in productions of

Shakespeare’s King Lear is ‘the most persistent Tate convention’.7 Further, Adler states that the fact that post-1838 productions continued to treat Shakespeare’s similarly to

Tate’s is not directly attributable to Tate’s influence. She argues that Tate’s adaptation expresses a uniform response to problems and paradoxes in Shakespeare’s play:

‘perhaps the conservative perpetuation of theatrical conventions associated with King

Lear affords an ongoing method of addressing the same problems and potentials originally addressed by Tate’.8 The influence of Tate's play and the enduring tension between the popularity of Tate’s version and the cultural significance of Shakespeare’s necessitates a comparative exploration of the meaning of the storm in in the two plays, before I return to the historical overview of the storm on stage.9

6 S. Johnson, ‘King Lear’ in The Preface to Shakespeare, (orig. publ. 1765), Ebooks, University Adelaide Library, Adelaide, 2010, retrieved from http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/johnson/samuel/preface/lear.html 11 August 2011. 7 D. Adler, ‘The Half-Life of Tate in King Lear’, The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol.7, No.3, Summer 1985, (pp.52-56) p.53. 8 Ibid., p.52. 9 While there has been some scholarship on the links between Tate and Shakespeare, currently no research considers the place of the storm in each of their versions of Lear. 86 Like many of Shakespeare’s plays, King Lear was adapted during the

Restoration period to suit the aesthetic and political tastes of a new generation of audiences.10 According to J.S. Bratton, Shakespeare’s version was tested twice on the

Restoration stage, in 1664 and again in 1675, before Tate adapted it in 1681.11 In a prologue to the printed text, Tate expressed the hope that 'those whose Tasts [sic] are

True' will be delighted by his changes to the story.12 Audiences were indeed delighted: the popularity of his Lear was such that it was performed almost every year in the eighteenth century.

In order to understand how the respective storms differ, it is necessary to understand the similarities and differences between the two Lears more generally.

Tate’s dramatis personae are very similar to Shakespeare’s: he retains Lear and his daughters, also Cornwall, Albany, Kent, Oswald, Gloucester, Edgar and Edmund, and he gives Cordelia a ‘minder’ called Arante (or Aranthe). The Fool most noticeably and

France are omitted entirely. As in Shakespeare, the division of the kingdom, the banishment of Cordelia and Edmund’s desire to claim land as a bastard son are some of the main catalysts of the conflict.

The most obvious difference between the two plots lies in their endings, as the final lines of each play make clear. In Shakespeare’s play the final lines are a grim reflection on the disaster that has unfolded in Lear’s name. In Quarto the lines are attributed to Albany, and in the Folio Edgar says:

10 The first adaptation was in 1662, The Law against Lovers, an adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing and Measure for Measure and the last in 1682, The Injured Princess, or The Fatal Wager, an adaptation of Cymbeline. On adaptation in the period, see B. Murray, Restoration Shakespeare: Viewing the Voice, Associated University Press, Cranbury, London and Mississauga, 2001. 11 J.S. Bratton (ed.), King Lear: Plays in Performance, Bristol Classical Plays, Bristol, 1987, viii. Bratton’s updated Cambridge CD Rom edition The Cambridge King Lear CD Rom, J.S. Bratton and C. Carson (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000.) of King Lear is now obsolete. Although it provides more information than this earlier edition, I refer to the print edition as it is, ironically, more user-friendly than the later CD Rom edition. 12 N. Tate, The History of King Lear, (orig. publ. 1681), Cornmarket Press, London, 1969, p.A6. 87 The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest have borne most and we who are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long (5.3.322-325).

The lines often delivered with most of the fallen characters lying dead on stage at the survivors' feet. Tate's ending, on the other hand, celebrates triumph, glorifies kingdom and, above all, champions love. Having married Cordelia and assumed the throne,

Edgar delivers this speech:

Our drooping Country now erects her Head, Peace spreads her balmy wings and Plenty Blooms. Divine Cordelia, all the Gods can witness How much thy Love to Empire I prefer! Thy bright Example shall convince the World (Whatever storms of Fortune are decreed) Truth and Vertue shall at last succeed.13

Critics generally regard his ending as the most notorious feature of Tate’s adaptation.14

Indeed, it may be worth observing that from the folk tradition to Monmouth to Tate,

Shakespeare is the odd man out: his is the only version of the Lear story in which the patriarch is not morally vindicated by survival at the end.

It would be wrong to regard Tate’s play as a return to a previous archetypal version of King Lear. He did far more than restore the original happy ending: he altered

Shakespeare's specific additions to the play, including the trajectory of the subplot and the events during the storm. First, Tate thoroughly complicated Shakespeare’s plot and subplot by devising a romance between Cordelia and Edgar. In the division of the kingdom, Cordelia is banished by her father and rejected by Burgundy and, in the absence of France, Edgar presents himself as the second suitor. Cordelia initially rejects him, but undeterred, he pursues Cordelia throughout the play. By not being married to

France, Cordelia is made much more prominent: she remains in England and is able to

13 Tate, History of King Lear, p.67: parentheses in the original. 14 See, for example, Bratton, King Lear, p.14 and Murray, Restoration Shakespeare, p.153. 88 respond immediately to the turmoil in the kingdom. Giving a more substantial role to one of the first professional actresses on the English public stage is doubtless one reason for this change, but it has a meaningful impact upon the drama as well. Lear’s journey and the new Edgar-Cordelia romance constitute the main plot of Tate’s adaptation and both come to a climax during the storm.

From Lear’s point of view, the storm plays out much the same as in

Shakespeare’s play: he rails to no effect against the winds and is moved to pray for the poor naked wretches who, like himself, are exposed to the pitiless storm. He is also lured toward, and eventually retreats into, a hovel. Lear seeks pity and, while the storm does not provide it, Cordelia does. But things play out quite differently between the other characters. Cordelia is concerned about her father, and when Edmund witnesses this he finds himself attracted by Cordelia’s piety and beauty. Intending to rape her, he bribes two ruffians to kidnap Cordelia. The storm, he argues, will drown out her cries for help: 'then too th' Field / Where like the vig'rous Jove I will enjoy / This Semele in a storm, 'twill deaf her Cries / Like Drums in a Battle, / less her Groans shou'd pierce /

My pittying Ear, and make the amorous Fight less fierce.'15 Meanwhile Cordelia insists that she and Arante go in search of Lear. They stumble upon the hovel, where Arante insists they take shelter. Cordelia refuses to retreat; her refusal is an adaptation of two of

Lear’s lines from Shakespeare’s version: ‘Prethee go in thy self, see thy own Ease, /

Where the Mind’s free, the Body’s Delicate: / This Tempest but diverts me from the

Thought / Of what wou’d hurt me more’.16 In other words, Cordelia's concern for her father makes her impervious to the storm's wrath and the storm distracts her from complete despair. Arante leaves her alone outside in the storm, at which point

15 Tate, History of King Lear, p.28. 16 Ibid., p.33; The lines from Shakespeare’s version used by Tate are, ‘When the mind’s free, / The body’s delicate: this tempest in my mind / Doth from my senses take all feeling else, / Save what beats there, filial ingratitude’ [3.4.11-14] and ‘Prithee go in thyself, seek thine own ease. / This tempest will not give me leave to ponder / On things that would hurt me more’ [3.4.23-25]. 89 Edmund’s ruffians strike. Cordelia cries for help, and Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, hears her voice and rushes from the hovel to her rescue. A grateful Cordelia witnesses

Poor Tom’s concern for her father. Excited that he has saved Cordelia, Edgar accidently drops his disguise and reveals that he knows her name. Cordelia becomes suspicious that this ‘madman’ knows her name and sees through his disguise. As such, Edgar reveals his true identity and Cordelia promptly falls in love with him. After the storm,

Lear is pacified; he unites with Edgar and Cordelia to reclaim the kingdom from

Cornwall, Edmund, Goneril and Regan, and they triumph. These changes to the plot alter the storm’s dramatic function: it is no longer the catalyst of the kingdom’s demise, but of its restoration. In other words, the events during Tate’s storm set the play on course for a happy ending.

Furthermore, in Tate’s version the overall significance of the storm is also altered because the cosmological dimension of Shakespeare's dramatic poetry is edited considerably. The last chapter showed how Shakespeare's King Lear examines the intersection between theatricality, cosmology and political power in order to explore the relations between king, kingdom and cosmos. The radical cosmology suggested by an indifferent storm enables Shakespeare to at once invoke the age old dilemma around the purpose or final cause of the weather, and incidentally to reference the questions around the structure and constitution of the cosmos nascent in England and Europe in 1606. But

Tate's King Lear cuts the complex cosmic drama and, instead, introduces the Edgar-

Cordelia romance in order to produce a legitimate and uncomplicated moral and political narrative. This strategy is what Barbara Murray describes as ‘The [Restoration] adapter’s motive to develop the visual and metaphoric coherence of the originals for entertainment and to enhance their didactic function’.17 So, in Shakespeare’s play, Lear

17 Murray, Restoration Shakespeare, p.18. 90 seeks pity and he does not receive it, as such he is prompted to rethink his place in the cosmos and question the purpose of the storm. By contrast, Tate’s storm is a ‘storm of fortune’: no ambiguity is raised regarding the storm’s purpose in the world, because when Lear seeks pity he receives it and triumphs.

The tendency away from the explicitly cosmological aspect of Shakespeare’s version is itself apparent in the dialogue. For example, when Shakespeare’s Lear disowns his Cordelia, he does so in explicitly cosmological terms: 'For by the sacred radiance of the sun, / The mysteries of Hecate and the night, / By all the operation of the orbs, / From who we do exists and cease to be / Here I disclaim my paternal care'

(1.1.110-114). Tate radically minimises the cosmic dimension of Lear’s oath: 'For by the sacred Sun and solemn Night / I here disclaim all my paternal care'.18 In both cases the good daughter is banished, of course, but Shakespeare’s Lear is more explicitly cosmological about it, calling on goddesses and heavenly spheres as he casts Cordelia off. Furthermore, in Shakespeare's version, the exchange between Edmund and

Gloucester in 1.2 clearly establishes the cosmic stakes of the drama. In his ‘excellent foppery of the world' speech Edmund soliloquises on his father’s superstitious pagan worldview and at the same time expounds his own inherent scepticism. Tate, however, removes this soliloquy outlining the play’s cosmic parameters, and gives Edmund instead a terse reiteration of his commitment to subterfuge: 'So, now my project's firm.'19 Tate does not frame Lear's motivations in cosmic terms; the differences between

Edmund and his father are moral not cosmological and, as such, the play does not call into question or make an issue of, an individual character's belief systems in the same way.20

18 Ibid., p.5. 19 Tate, History of King Lear, p.9. 20 Tate’s version of King Lear is more easily thought of as a targeted reworking of the political drama, thus making his reworking of the cosmic drama incidental. The adaptation is now widely 91 To summarise the differences between Shakespeare and Tate, firstly, Tate’s storm brings the romantic subplot and main Lear plot together; during the storm Lear is saved, Cordelia is rescued, Edgar and Cordelia fall in love, and the plot turns sharply towards its triumphant ending. As such, Tate’s storm does not provoke an explicit reconsideration of the relationship between the cosmos and the human drama. Secondly, the characters neither conceive of themselves nor their actions in cosmological terms and, as such, the play does not aim make any radical cosmological links between the storm and the action, other than the fact the storm is something that good, virtuous and legitimate characters have the capacity to triumph over.

Finally, with regard to the changing significance of the storm itself, what the difference between the two storms reveals is that Shakespeare’s questioning of the relationship between kingdom and cosmos was not as interesting or topical in 1681 as it was in 1606. In 1606 Shakespeare’s King Lear was, in part, an exploration of the range of cosmic worldviews circulating at the time and also their potentially complex relationship with the social order. While the story of the king and his three daughters may have been one of our oldest cultural fables, the cosmic dimension that Shakespeare gave it had already begun to lose currency by the 1660s. The Restoration did not solve the problems generated by Copernicus and his followers, but these were acknowledged and given a place in society with the foundation, in 1660, of the Royal Society of

London for Improving of Natural Knowledge. The great cosmological questions were nowhere near resolution, indeed they are still being debated today, but by the

Restoration heliocentric theories did not pose an amorphous conceptual threat to the understood as supporting the monarchy, see for example C.B. Hardman, ‘“Our Drooping Country Now Erects Her Head”: Nahum Tate’s “History of King Lear”’, Modern Language Review, Vol.95, No.4, 2000, pp.913-923. In order to produce the ‘restoration’ of the monarchy at the end, of course, Shakespeare’s cosmic drama – and with it the significance of the storm – would have to be altered. Tate’s purpose was not to challenge the cosmic worldview of the monarch, but rather to reassert it. But for my purposes it is more useful to think directly about how he edits the cosmic drama. 92 establishment as they had in the early years of the seventeenth century. While it is possible that an audience member in 1681 gleaned something of the cosmic drama, it was certainly not the strikingly radical or politically topical issue that it had been decades before. Indeed, it would probably have struck him as old-fashioned or, at the very least, overwrought.

Bearing in mind the complex relationship between Shakespeare and Tate, and the latter’s virtual excision of the play’s cosmological dimension, I want now to look at the technical production of storms on the Jacobean and subsequent stages. It may at first glance seem odd to move from a close comparative reading of Shakespeare and Tate to an overview of developments in theatre technologies as they affect the creation of the storm. However, the comparative reading is necessary foreshadowing. As I mentioned earlier, while a drum-roll or shaken sheets of metal might always suggest the rumblings of thunder, the meanings attached to this noise in a particular dramatic context are likely to change significantly. Throughout the long period covered in this chapter there is a growing ambition to reproduce real thunder, lightning, wind and rain onstage. But the dramatic story establishes the significance of the thunder, lightning, wind and rain, as such the differences between Shakespeare’s and Tate’s plays have an important bearing on the meaningful conclusions we can draw about the storms in each production.

2.2. The Jacobean Storm

Before thinking about the spectacle of the Lear storm in particular, I should consider the creation of meteorological upheavals in general on Shakespeare’s stage.

While we tend to think of the Shakespearean stagecraft as simple and non- representational, Gwilym Jones reckons that the storm would have been different. He argues that although 'little is made of the effect of the storm’, in early modern drama,

93 but in reality, he continues, ‘thunder and lightning in an Elizabethan theatre would have been a hugely impressive and noisy affair, with rockets, fireworks and squibs, providing noise and spectacle.'21 Indeed, Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre-makers were obsessed with meteorological effects and developed a range of complex technical means by which to represent the meteors on stage.22

In an often-quoted passage in the prologue to Every Man in his Humour (1598)

Ben Jonson criticises the use of spectacular special effects on the Elizabethan stage, implying that they were overused:

(The playwright) rather prays you will be pleas’d to see / One such to-day as other plays should be; / Where neither … / nimble squib is seen, to make afear’d / The gentlewomen, nor roll’d bullet heard / To say, it thunders, nor tempestuous drum / Rumbles, to tell you when the storm doth come; / But deeds, and language (13-21).23

His use of the imperative 'should' signals his position on the matter: a staged storm detracts from the art of the theatre and an audience should be satisfied with well-crafted dramatic action and poetic dialogue.24 Jonson’s snide remark suggests that audiences preferred spectacular storms to fine words and that acting companies were happy to satisfy their wishes by using extravagant and elaborate special effects. Shakespeare, however, as Keith Sturgess observes, ‘had greater faith in the power of theatrical

21 G. Jones, ‘“Thus much show of fire”: Storm and Spectacle in the Opening of the Globe’, in P. Drouet (ed.),The Spectacular in and around Shakespeare, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2009, (pp.3-16) p.5. 22 On lighting the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages, see R.B. Graves, Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567-1642, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 2009 and P. Butterworth, Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in Early English and Scottish Theatre, Society for Theatre Research Press, London, 1998. 23 B. Jonson, Everyman in his Humour, (orig. publ. 1601), Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2000, p.2. 24 In arguments with his scenic artist Inigo Jones, Jonson advocated simple staging. See, for example, D.J. Gordon, ‘Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol.12, 1949, pp.152-178. 94 illusion’ than Jonson.25 In view of how frequently meteorological effects are called for in his plays, he likely tested his belief in the power of theatrical illusion at every opportunity.

To produce the dazzling visual and aural spectacle of a storm, Elizabethan players would have drawn upon all the available technologies of the day. There were no electric or gas technologies to assist the production, but sound and light effects played a significant role in productions. Effects were produced by means of a combination of chemicals and fire, alongside mechanical devices and musical instruments. The most widely used means of creating thunder was a device known as a 'thunder roll' or

'thunder run'. It featured a cannon ball (Jonson refers to a ‘bullet’) rolled down a wooden trough. As Jonson notes, a drum was another simple way of invoking distant and rolling rumbles of thunder. Lightning was produced with a variety of devices, combined with fireworks and other flammable substances. Sprinkling powdered starch or iron filings over flame produced a slightly different light effect; the substances would combine and combust in order to simulate dazzling sparkles of lighting. There was also an effect called the 'thunderbolt', which was a different meteor altogether. According to

Phillip Butterworth, 'thunderbolts were used as a signal or statement from God or heaven to an earthly recipient': a thunderbolt was 'essentially a fizzing, flaming streak of fire delivered at rapid speed'. A device called a SWevels [sic], otherwise known as

'rockets-' or 'fireworks-' or 'squibs-on-lines', was also used in the creation of the effect.

The 'rocket-on-line', the name of which gives a clear idea of the device itself, is a firework run along a flameproof rope that created a streak of light and sound as it moved. The sound of rain was created by the use of dried balls of starch in a wooden box; depending on how it was handled the device could also create the noise of a low

25 K. Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatre, Routledge, New York and London, 1987, p.81. 95 thunder rumble.26 Considering the indoor private theatre, Sturgess identifies two other devices, very likely used in the creation of the storm in The Tempest: 'a sea machine

(small pebbles revolved in a drum) and a wind machine (a loose length of canvas turned on a wheel)'.27 It is no less likely that similar devices were used for the creation of rain and wind in Lear as well. Although backdrops were beginning to be used in court masques at the time, we can be confident that painted backdrops were rarely used in the public or private theatre, and in the storm scenes there is no need for props or set of any kind, so sound and light effects were crucial to the creation of the storm.

With no specific information about the staging of King Lear's storm, we can only make an educated guess at what such a complex spectacle might have looked like in the company’s two major theatres. Although Andrew Gurr argues that the playhouses are merely 'convenient accessories to the business of playing',28 the physical conditions of the two playing spaces would have had a significant impact on the overall aural, visual and, by implication, cosmological implications of the storm. As the Quarto’s title page and the Stationer’s Register indicate, the first performance of King Lear was at

Whitehall on St Stephen’s night, 26 December 1606.29 But, as is widely accepted, King

Lear was likely written for the Globe, and was probably first performed there, perhaps earlier in 1606, or in 1607, with Richard Burbage in the role of Lear. Once in the repertory of the King’s Men it would have been played at both the Globe and, after the company’s acquisition of this theatre in 1609, at Blackfriars.

Situated on the south bank of the Thames in London, the Globe was a large open-air public theatre built by the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1599. Able to

26 Butterworth, Theatre of Fire, p.44, 45, 230, 42, 44, 46. 27 Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatre, p.81. 28 A. Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992, p.115. 29 The only other recorded performance of King Lear during Shakespeare's lifetime was by a provincial company at Nidderdale in Yorkshire in 1610. 96 accommodate between 1500 and 3000 in its three-tiered auditorium, it had a raised apron stage that thrust out into the pit, where for a penny the 'groundlings' would stand to watch the performance.30 Performances took place in the afternoon, so were heavily dependent on natural light and good weather.

Acquired by the King’s Men in 1608/9,31 the Blackfriars was in a way the architectural opposite of the Globe: its intimate, indoor, rectangular auditorium had an estimated capacity of about 700 people, all of them seated, some on stools on the stage itself. While we have no record of performances of King Lear there, there is strong evidence for The Tempest having been played there, indeed having been expressly written for the Blackfriars’ particular conditions.32 We can be confident that Lear’s storm, like Prospero’s, was created for the same stage. While the Blackfriars did not have the same explicitly cosmological architecture as the open-roofed Globe, its artificial oil- and candle-lighting would have given a special intensity to the storm scenes. The cathedral ceilings of the venue created sensitive acoustics, enhancing the aural effect of the thunder and the visual effects of the lightning; the fireworks of the storm needed only to compete with candlelight, rather than daylight, for lightning effects. Moreover, music was also a much more significant feature of performances in the private than the public theatre. In their designated music room to the side of the

Blackfriars’ stage, the musicians, doubling here as sound-effects men, would doubtless

30 On theatre-going in the early seventeenth century, see A, Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996. 31 On The Tempest at Blackfriars, see Sturgess, pp.73-97 and A. Gurr, ‘The Tempest’s Tempest at Blackfriars, Shakespeare Survey 41: Shakespearean Stages and Staging, S. Wells (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, pp.91-102. 32 This assertion is based on the fact, first, that indoor productions needed breaks between the acts in order for the candles to be trimmed, and second, as Gurr observed in ‘The Tempest’s Tempest’, that a break is implied between Acts IV and V, Prospero and Ariel being directed to exit at the end of Act IV and re-enter at once at the beginning of Act V. 97 have added to the sound of the thunder-roll or thunder-sheet their own music (likely that of strings, woodwind and organ) in order to create the tumult of the storm.33

As Jonson’s prologue implies, storms were very popular with audiences, as important to the commercial success of an early modern production as exciting new special effects are to modern blockbuster film. As Jones points out, storms may have been designed specifically to lure audiences away from rival companies: 'the Globe and the Rose ... were less than fifty yards apart ... It is therefore quite possible that the audience and the players at the Rose would have been distracted, and intrigued, by the violent sounds coming from nearby.'34 They were also incredibly dangerous to create; one mistake could result in the whole theatre burning down. Storms were the highlights of the early modern theatre; they were technologically complex and expensive theatrical spectacles designed to enhance the dramatic action and attract large audiences.

How, then, is this fiery and stormy spectacle to be linked to the idiosyncratic storm in Shakespeare's version of King Lear? There is no reason to suspect that any expense was spared on the creation of the storm in King Lear. The King's Men likely embraced the opportunity to capitalise on a stormy spectacle. Furthermore, if stage directions have any relationship with the early performance history35 of King Lear, then

'Storm and tempest' and 'Storm still' in the Folio may indicate that the construction of the storm in King Lear was more memorable and lengthy than most meteorological events on the early modern stag. Indeed, by virtue of its duration and position at the

33 Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatre, pp.82-83. 34 Jones, “Thus much show of fire”, p.8. 35 Due to its substantial differences from the Quartos, there are several theories around the origins of the Folio text, one of which is that it was revised with regards to edits made during rehearsals and productions. The most focused analysis of the two texts in this regard is R. Clare’s ‘“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”: The Theory of Authorial Revision between Quarto and Folio Texts of King Lear’, The Library, Vols. 6-17, No.1, pp.34-59. For other perspectives on the differences between the two texts see G. Taylor and M. Warren, The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two versions of King Lear, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1983 and S. Urkowitz, Shakespeare’s revision of King Lear, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1980. 98 climax of the drama alone, the spectacle of Lear’s storm may have trumped even Julius

Caesar’s thunderous opening scenes.36

But also, as I argued in the previous chapter, the storm in King Lear subverted the dramatic conventions concerning the representation of the meteors. The degree of

Shakespeare’s break with convention is only further confirmed by an analysis of King

Lear on the Globe stage. In Playhouse and Cosmos Kent van den Berg argues that ‘the architecture of the playhouse objectifies in its basic spatial relationships the metaphoric relations of play and reality that Shakespeare establishes in dramatic fiction’.37 If the stage was a microcosm of the early modern world, then the Globe was the example par excellence because, taken as a whole, the structure resembled the entire classical cosmos. The Globe’s name and architecture resembles the geocentric cosmos: the heavens objectified in the roof above the stage and the stage itself represented the earth at the centre. Stage storms literally originated in the heavens of the Globe theatre; with some sound and light resonating from the attic room above the actors’ heads. Hamlet famously describes how the roof, walls and pillars not only structurally resembled the cosmos, but were also decorated as such: ‘This goodly frame, the earth / … / this brave overhanging firmament, / this majestical roof fretted with golden fire’ (Ham. 2.2.300-

303). In King Lear, Lear does not simply describe the heavens, but rather calls upon them to physically correspond with his power or take pity on his plight. Lear calls upon the theatre itself to be a ‘goodly frame’ for his actions. But tragically it does not. This conventional relationship between the playhouse and the cosmos is broken in King Lear because the storm does not come from the gods and it does not correspond with any pre- existing worldview within the drama.

36 For an extended analysis on the spectacular opening of Julius Caesar see Jones, ‘Thus much show of fire’. 37 K. Van den Berg, Playhouse and Cosmos: Shakespearean Theater as Metaphor, University of Delaware Press, Newark, 1985, p.23. 99 When Lear seeks to know ‘causes of thunder’, at a dramatic level he asks about the storm’s purpose with regard to his place in the world; but at a metatheatrical level he questions the purpose of the storm within the drama as a whole and casts doubt upon the cosmology represented by the theatre space itself. Thus the grand fiery meteorological spectacle in the Globe theatre likely made Lear's situation even more significant. The audience were primed for a happy ending as per the earlier versions of the Lear story.

Furthermore, as was indicated in the previous chapter, the first incarnation of

Shakespeare’s King Lear was likely billed as a history and not a tragedy, and therefore the audience would have no specific reason to expect a radical departure from the historical narrative. The audience would likely have expected the extra long and spectacular ‘Storm and tempest’ to correspond with Lear’s situation; the excitement of this moment was likely intensified by Lear’s cries, supported by the audience’s expectations and buttressed by the architecture of the theatre itself. But all this is contested by the storm’s failure to respond to Lear’s cries. Thus the stormy spectacle in early public playhouse productions of King Lear would most likely have reinforced

Shakespeare's distinctive representation of the pitiless cosmos. These early representations at once referenced the long tradition of philosophical speculation in the face of meteorological violence and also invoked the debate around the structure and shape of the cosmos itself that developed in England in the first decade of the seventeenth century.

2.3. The Restoration Storm

There is a continuum, rather than a chasm, between the theatres' closure in 1642 and reopening in 1661. Rather than thinking of the closure of the public theatres during the interregnum as the complete cessation of performing arts, it is more useful to

100 conceive of the interregnum simply a period of theatre between Caroline and

Restoration theatres, in which theatre artists cultivated their practice either illegally or in private.38 New methods of changing sets and of creating flying effects, as well as decorative techniques, like trompe l’oeil painting effects – all defining elements of

Restoration stagecraft – were cultivated while the theatres were closed. But of course when King Charles II issued licences and exclusive patents for William D’Avenant and

Thomas Killigrew to reopen the theatres in 1661, there was an enormous spike in the scale, frequency and vibrancy of public theatre performance. The legal and financial support of the new monarchy created a vibrant new artistic culture. Theatres were redesigned and rebuilt, new plays were written, old ones were rewritten and many new technologies were deployed. With the patenting of two legitimate theatres, the rights to

Shakespeare’s plays were split between the licensees. The performance rights for King

Lear went to D’Avenant’s company, the Duke’s Men, and it was for them that Tate penned his adaptation. In 1681 Tate’s King Lear premiered and with it came the opportunity to stage a stormy spectacle that did not call the constitution of the cosmos into question but instead facilitated romance. A new storm sequence in an updated theatre enabled artists to exercise their innovative design techniques and technologies, satisfied the audience’s enduring desire for spectacle and, at the same time, facilitated the theatrical representation of love and virtue and the restoration of legitimate authority.

Beyond the fact that Tate's King Lear was written during this period, it is an incredibly important time for this overview of the storm on stage for a range of reasons.

First, according to J.L. Styan, this is a period of revolution in theatre architecture: the

38 For an analysis of the interregnum theatre see D. Lewcock, Sir William Davenant, the Court Masque, and the English Seventeenth-Century Scenic Stage, c1605-c1700, Cambria Press, Amherst, 2008. 101 'fifty years (following the Restoration) saw extraordinary innovation in almost all departments of the drama; in particular … the playhouse.'39 Restoration playhouses were not modelled on the Elizabethan and Jacobean public theatres, rather they were modelled on the private theatres like Blackfriars and architectural designs imported from continental Europe.40 Thus, the polygonal amphitheatres of early seventeenth century London were replaced by large rectangular buildings, the main features of which were an indoor auditorium, a stage with scenery, a proscenium arch and one or two doors on either side of the forestage, balconies over the doors, and a music gallery.41 Backed by changing scenery on a scenic stage, the actors played close to their audiences, essentially on a shallow apron. Thus in the Restoration we see a distinct move towards the kind of actor-spectator relationship that came to define the modern playhouse. Secondly, the cultivation of painted backdrops and movable scenery would change the nature of the reality constructed on stage, tending towards a more pictorial and animated stage setting. Furthermore, in 1660 Charles II permitted women to act professionally on the public stage, thus opening up new opportunities for dramatists to represent heterosexual love and romance.42 In Tate’s adaptation, the fact that women can be on stage is exploited to its full extent, with the events during the storm scene explicitly facilitating the romantic turn in the plot, as well as the happy ending.

The storm in Tate’s King Lear on the Restoration stage was produced with a combination of old and new technology. For all the innovation of the Restoration stage, thunder, lightning, wind and rain were created with almost the same technologies as the

Jacobeans. Gas lighting was still over a century away; Restoration theatre artists were

39 J.L. Styan, The English Stage: A History of Drama and Performance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p.237. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., pp.240-241. 42 E. Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660-1700, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992, p.21. 102 still entirely dependent on candles for ambient lighting and fireworks for lighting effects. Sound was still entirely acoustic, there was likely music for atmosphere, as in the Jacobean private theatre, and technologies like dried starch balls in small wooden box to emulate rain, as well as drums and the thunder-run for thunder were still deployed for sound effects. But alongside these fiery effects the stage scenery itself moved towards a pictorial and animated spectacle.

Restoration theatre is marked by the development of mechanisms for changeable scenery and variations on these innovations are still used in theatres today. Although all new techniques were not necessarily used in King Lear, the technologies moved stage pictures closer to an animated reflection of the world. Elaborate rope systems and cranes enabled motion in the set, a tree could now appear to move in the wind and waves could roll like a stormy sea. In plays calling for magic, such as The Tempest, 43 characters were also flown on ropes or platforms rigged up to the system. Such machinery existed in various forms since the time of the Ancient Greeks but it was generally used in the construction of buildings rather than theatre sets.44 In Restoration theatre it was finally employed for creative ends. Trompe l’oeil painting techniques were used upon moveable scenery. The illusion created with this painterly technique combined with mechanical development marks the real beginnings of the creation of a

43 For a good indication of the scale of stormy spectacles during the Restoration, see the stage direction for the opening scene of William D’Avenant and John Dryden’s 1667 adaptation of the The Tempest – The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island (D’Avenant and Dryden, The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island, Jacob Tonson, London, 1735). D’Avenant and Dryden co- ordinated an extended supernatural visual and aural extravaganza that combined traditional sound and light effects with new technologies such as flying objects, movable scenery, and painted backdrops. The lengthy stage direction draws a complete picture of the proscenium arch theatre, with a curtain and a frontispiece with Royal ornamentation signalling the company’s royal patronage, and raised stage in a covered auditorium. This is very different to the round wooden, open air space of the Globe. Also, we get a clear image of an orchestra set on the apron stage, indicating the growing divide between the audience 'pit' and the stage space itself. 44 E.A. Langhans, ‘The Theatre’ in The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre, D.P. Fisk (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, p.10.

103 dynamic and pictorial stage. With these technologies and techniques, the Restoration theatre maker, like his Jacobean ancestors, aimed to stage the meteors as a stylised representation of nature. They painted cloudy skies and constructed windswept landscapes. These pictorial elements combined with the aural and visual devices used to create thunder, lighting, wind and rain to complete the staged storm.

Although there is no extant information on the storm in late seventeenth-century productions of either Shakespeare's King Lear or Tate’s The History of King Lear, we can imagine the meaning of the storm in the redesigned theatres with the new devices and technologies, alongside the adapted dramatic work. Where Shakespeare specifically engaged a tradition of cosmological questioning in the face of meteorological violence, in Tate the storm is retained as an obstacle for the hero to confront, but also triumphantly overcome. The storm on the Restoration stage was a spectacular event that enabled the dramatisation of the capacity for legitimate moral authority to survive times of extreme tumultuousness. Precisely what idea about the relationship between king, kingdom and cosmos is represented in Tate’s play is unclear. The storm in Tate’s play facilitates the triumph of legitimate order, which can be read as both an expression of nostalgia for a time when royal power was thought to correspond to the movement of the meteors, but also is clearly also a representation of nascent Enlightenment ideals of morality, nature and the exceptional human condition in the play’s triumphant representation of truth and virtue despite 'storms of fortune'. Indeed, Tate’s storm points backwards and forwards in history like the storm in Shakespeare’s play, but with a much more affirmative vision of the powers of the human.

Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to go into the history of meteorology during this period, it is also worth noting that the storm in Tate’s play signals a slight change in the broad cultural conception of the meteors. Craig Martin

104 argues that, even though Aristotle’s model is usually characterised as disappearing by the late seventeenth century, replaced as if overnight with the modern method of understanding the meteors, in reality the Aristotelian mode of thinking about the meteors lingered around for much longer.45 Ultimately, it is a period of transition in the scientific, philosophical and cultural understanding of the meteors. As I indicated in the last chapter, Fulke's Goodly Gallery was in print until the mid-seventeenth century with the title Meteors. The sustained popularity of Fulke’s mid-fifteenth century text implies that there was still broad cultural interest in learning about a cosmically connected and theologically charged classical meteorological model well into the seventeenth century.

But, at the same time, the Royal Society was founded in 1660 and this institutionalised the instrumental study of the natural world. In 1667 Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal

Society of London for the Improvement of Naturall Knowledge was published. This book consolidated the Society’s work to date, and included a section that described the new instrumental method for understanding the weather: ‘For the better making a

History of the Weather, I conceive it requisite to observe … by a sealed Thermometer

… a Hygroscope … an Instrument with Quicksilver (Barometer)’.46 But at the same time natural philosophers still used Aristotelian vocabulary such as ‘exhalations’,

‘vapours’ and ‘heavenly bodies’ at the same time as trying to measure its material constitution: Descartes extensive work on Meteorology involves a mix of the two models, for instance.47 There is not a complete change in the general understanding of the meteors between 1606 and 1681. The providential or cosmic aspects of the meteors

45 C. Martin, Renaissance Meteorology: Pomponazzi to Descartes, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2011, pp.148-155. 46 R. Hooke, ‘A Method For making a History of the Weather’ in T. Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Naturall Knowledge, (orig. publ. 1667), Early English Books Online, retrieved from http://eebo.chadwyck.com, 12 February 2012. 47 See R. Descartes, ‘Meteorology’, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, (orig. publ. 1637), P. J. Olscamp (trans.), Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis and Cambridge, 2001, pp.263-261.

105 are still present in the popular and philosophical imaginary. But the meteors have begun to lose their broader cosmic connections and are in the process of being replaced by a more pragmatic and mechanical understanding of the earth’s atmosphere. Furthermore, in Tate’s version, there is no need to worry about the precise constitution of the storm as the characters triumph, despite the stormy interference.

2.4. The Enlightenment Storm

A violent storm swept across England in late November 1703, leading to the deaths of hundreds of people. The storm was so severe, it was referred to as the most violent storm in British history as late as 1987.48 The storm was well documented in broadsheets and pamphlets at the time. This is largely due to the work of Daniel Defoe.

Defoe edited a collection of responses to the great storm of 1703 for the specific purpose that its violence and wrath not be forgotten. The publication was specifically designed to reflect the range of different opinions on the meteors that were circulating at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Defoe recognised that the different opinions on the causes of the 1703 storm had parallels with the history of philosophical speculation in the face of meteorological violence. He prefaced the collection with a lengthy summary of the range of different opinions on the causes of the storms, from Aristotle and Seneca to Hobbs and Descartes. He concluded that, ‘the deepest search into the region of cause and consequence, has found out just enough to leave the wisest philosopher in the dark, to bewilder his head and drown his understanding. You raise a storm in nature by the very inquiry’.49 It appears that same widespread ambiguity

48 J. Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007, p.44. 49 D. Defoe, ‘The Storm: or, a Collection Of the most Remarkable Causalities and Disasters Which happen’d in the Late Dreadful Tempest, Both By Sea and Land’, (orig. publ. 1704) in Defoe’s Works, Vol.5: The Novels and Miscellaneous Works of Daniel De Foe, George Bell & Sons, London, 1881, p.260. 106 around the final causes of thunder was extant in 1703 as it was almost one hundred years earlier in 1606.50 The difference between 1606 and 1703 is that, although there were still scholars and journalists from all theological persuasions writing about the storm, a new professional class of scientists tried to understand the event as well. By

1703 the nascent empirical science of meteorology started to debunk the Aristotelian model, with the goal to entirely eliminate the doubt and superstition that was always part of meteorological thinking. In his account of the storm, Defoe includes religious interpretations of the causes of the storm and fables of providential escape alongside transcripts from the Royal Society’s meteorological records51 and quite mundane descriptions of the various effects of the storm from damage on land and water to earthquakes and high tides.52

Despite the fact that the century started with a storm that showed the deep ideological divides between individual worldviews, the consequences of the storm in

Tate’s King Lear remained unambiguous on the London stage: this storm facilitated romance and survival, not death and destruction. The virtuous live through Tate’s storm.

The storm is a fantasy in which legitimate authority triumphantly survives. Like in the

Restoration, the storm in eighteenth-century productions of Tate’s King Lear did not call into question the meaning of the meteors themselves, but rather further emphasised

Tate’s link between virtuous and legitimate moral authority and the heavens. As I mentioned above, Tate’s Lear was produced almost every year in the eighteenth century. The fantasy of an old man triumphing over the wicked and surviving nature’s fury really captured the imaginations of the eighteenth-century audience.

50 Golinski’s British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment is the most comprehensive look at the study and cultural understanding of meteorology in the eighteenth century, in which he shows that although all commentators claimed that although in all publications God was ultimately authored the storm, the sustained debate around the nature of this violent storm reflected the variety of opinions about the degree to which God was involved in the storm. 51 Defoe, ‘The Storm’, p.273. 52 Ibid., 299. 107 There are no significant technological advances in the eighteenth century that clearly mark the shift from Restoration to Georgian theatre. So, on the one hand, the

Georgian theatre is simply a bigger and bolder version of its predecessor. On the other hand, the desire to create an animated and pictorial world on stage is taken to a new level of complexity with similar technologies. For example, the Theatre Royal on Drury

Lane initially accommodated between 1400 and 2000 audience members.53 But by 1792 it was expanded to accommodate over 3000 people, with some extant designs suggesting its capacity may have exceeded 3600.54 Over the course of the century, acting styles became necessarily louder and more declamatory, in order to be audible in the cavernous spaces and over the noise of such a large audience. So, although the

Georgian theatre was still entirely illuminated by candlelight, the larger scale changed the nature of performance within its walls. As well as this, new design techniques assisted the creation of a pictorial spectacle on the stage, and perpetuated theatre artists’ desire for a dynamic stage illusion. Sarah Hatchuel argues that it is in this period that we can see the nascent desire for the production of a filmic or virtual reality in the theatre.55

Despite the minimal technological advances, there are some subtle developments in theatre technology that impact upon the overall aesthetic representation of a storm. The pictorialism that defined the eighteenth-century stage was enhanced by means of two key design innovations. First, during the period, perspective scene painting was imported from Opera production in Italy.56 This enabled theatre artists to create a three-dimensional pictorial setting: a castle, a court, a heath, a hovel, a battlefield or a beach, for example, could be constructed on stage not just as suggested in the backdrop. This technique pushes the stage picture closer to a three-dimensional

53 Styan, The English Stage, p.274. 54 Ibid., p.275. 55 S. Hatchuel, Shakespeare, from Stage to Screen, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, p.1-33. 56 Styan, The English Stage, p.277. 108 and animated mirror of not only human action but also the pictorial setting itself.

Second, this pictorial reality was further animated by the development of the stage

'wings', where moveable scenery and painted flats could be stored when not in use.

Scenery and flats were also fitted to grooves in the floor, in order to be easily moved on and off stage as required.57 The combined effect of the perspective scene painting and the movable and storable scenery meant that the stage began to look more and more like an animate world distinct from that of the audience.

It is within this context, cavernous theatre spaces with loud declamatory acting and an animated pictorial setting, that Tate’s King Lear became very popular, with performances recorded in every year between 1708 and 1782.58 The most famous incarnation of Lear during the period was performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, under the leadership of one of the most famous actor-managers of the English stage,

David Garrick. While we have a lot of detail about Garrick’s various performances and his version of Tate’s play script – it was Garrick who began the process of returning

Shakespeare’s Lear to the stage59 – little is known about the precise designs of his production of Lear.60 The records are full of details of his performance. So I will simply try to construct an image of the eighteenth-century staged storm, which was still very much aimed at the representation of a spectacular meteorological event.

57 Ibid., 274. 58 C. B. Hogan, The London Stage, 1660: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments & Afterpieces, Together with Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment / Complied from the Playbills, Newspapers and Theatrical Diaries of the Period, Southern Illinois Press, Carbondale, 1968. 59 For a good analysis of Garrick’s version of King Lear see V. Cunningham, Shakespeare and Garrick, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008, pp.119-161. 60 Given the amount of information on Garrick’s performance of Lear, this struck me as odd. I am confident I have not missed something for two reasons. In Cunningham’s Shakespeare and Garrick, the issue of design barely rates a mention. Furthermore, one of the first major historical studies of Garrick’s work hit up against the same obstacle with regards to the storm, ‘It is frustrating to think that the wealth of contemporary comment on his portrayal—in which the frantic part of Lear ‘seems never to have been rightly understood till this Gentleman studied it’—has left us with little more than a vacuous legacy.’ K. A. Burnim, David Garrick, Director, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1973, p.146. 109 Benjamin Wilson’s painting mid-eighteenth century painting ‘Mr. Garrick in the

Character of King Lear’, (date unknown.) now exists only as a mezzotint by James

McArdell (1761) (Illus. 10) provides us with a good impression of what an eighteenth- century Lear may have looked like out in the storm on stage. Garrick looks triumphant with a single ray of light touching his face. The landscape is perfectly pictorial, with trees in the foreground, and rolling hills in the background, dark clouds loom and lightning strikes – he is the true romantic hero. Although Stuart Sillars argues that we cannot be sure that paintings of Shakespeare productions were sketches of the stage design,61 we can at least assume that the painting is likely a representation of the overall experience and tone of the performance, even if it is not a direct sketch of the stage picture itself. Stage and painting shared many conventions at this time with regard to notions of beauty and gestural presentations as well.

Although we do not know much about Garrick's production aside from the quality of his performances, Garrick’s appointment of the painter Philip James de

Loutherbourg as his resident scenic artist in 1771, reveals his aesthetic ambitions for the stage design of the storm. By 1771, de Loutherbourg was already a well-known landscape painter, spending much of the seventeen sixties exhibiting in the Paris Salon.

He was paid £500 per year to create sets and paint backdrops for Garrick's productions, including his productions of Lear.62 Furthermore, after his time at Drury Lane, de

Loutherbourg went on to create Eidophusikon, which translates from Greek as ‘image of nature’. Eidophusikon was a moving theatrical art exhibition inspired by the theatre yet technologically more advanced. Eidophusikon tells us certain things about the aesthetic preoccupations of de Loutherbourg, but also the technological limitations of

61 Sillars argues for a complex, multi-directional interaction between painting, illustration, text and production in both his books. See S. Sillars, Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720-1820, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2006 and S. Sillars, The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709-1875, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008. 62 Burnim, pp.72-73. 110 scenic art in the eighteenth-century theatre. Furthermore, de Loutherbourg's project directly inspired the staging of one seminal nineteenth-century production of King Lear in particular that I mention in the next section on the storms in the nineteenth century.

Thus, through an understanding of Eidophusikon, we can speculate on what a storm in

King Lear may have looked like on Garrick’s eighteenth century stage.

Illus. 10: Mr. Garrick in the character of King Lear.

Eidophusikon, 'Representation of Nature' or 'Various Representations of Natural

Phenomena, represented by Moving Picture' captured the eighteenth-century desire to create an animated natural setting. Practically speaking, it was a small room constructed within a room of a house, museum or theatre. The first public showing was in de

Loutherbourg’s home in 1781, although it made its way into public display in following

111 years.63 This room-within-a-room was darkened and there were a series of scenes constructed and performed for the viewer. Each new showing of the Eidophusikon slightly altered the scenes themselves but for the very first showing the audience witnessed the passing of a whole day in a range of different locations and weather conditions, including a final storm scene.64 De Loutherbourg created some lighting technologies to indicate the passing of time that became important techniques in the theatre during the nineteenth century. For example, he created a method to change the colour of light. De Loutherbourg achieved the changes by means of small slips of coloured glass placed inside the candle lanterns. The scenes themselves were not only painted wood panels, but also draped with lighter fabrics that could be moved or removed to indicate more subtle changes. The creation of lightning and thunder was not greatly different to that of the earlier theatre: a sheet of copper suspended in air agitated by hand, a machine to agitate stones and balls to create a rumbling, and firecrackers to create flashes of light. But, within the context of the Eidophusikon, the illusion of the thunder and lightning combined with painted and lit backdrops, created the illusion of a moving image. The animated pictorial spectacle was so enthralling that that when a real thunderstorm passed overhead, one audience member was reported to have declared that de Loutherbourg’s thunder was more realistic than nature itself.65

The aesthetic goal was to add the dimension of time to a painting, something that the theatre aimed for but could not yet achieve technologically. One journalist at the time insisted that de Loutherbourg

63 R. Altick, The Shows of London, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1978, p.121. 64 The scenes for the first showing were: ‘1. Aurora, or the Effects of the Dawn, with a View of London from Greenwich Park; 2. Noon, the Port of Tangier in Africa, with the distant view of the Rock of Gibraltar and Europa Point; 3. Sunset, a View near Naples; 4. Moonlight, a View in the Mediterranean, the Rising of the Moon contrasted with the Effect of Fire; 5. The Conclusive Scene, a Storm at Sea, and Shipwreck.’ Altick, The Shows of London, p.124. 65 Altick, The Shows of London, p.124. 112 resolved to add motion to resemblance. He knew that the most exquisite painting represented only one moment of time action, and though we might justly admire the representation … the heightened look soon perceived the object to be at rest … He therefore planned a series of moving pictures which should unite the painter and the mechanic; by giving natural motion to accurate resemblance.66

The dynamism of the passing of natural time was literally animated for the spectator.

The aesthetic experience is reminiscent of Bacon's express desire over a century earlier in The New Atlantis for 'great and spacious houses to imitate and demonstrate the meteors'.67 But in this case the room that housed this microcosm was not built for the purposes of study, but instead built solely for the purposes of entertainment, wonder and visual stimulation. In the Eidophusikon, the wonders of nature collided with the wonders of human ingenuity and technology, and produced the most popular spectacular entertainment in Britain and Europe in the eighteenth century.

From the Eidophusikon we can extrapolate some ideas about Garrick's desires for the theatre and also the audience’s sustained desire for a dynamic meteorological spectacle. First it is important to note that de Loutherbourg's display did not have the time constraints of the live theatre, the pressures of the plot, the duration of the scenes, variable pace of the dialogue and the complexities of scene changes. Its sole purpose was to animate the dynamics of nature. De Loutherbourg could only achieve such visual trickery when insulated from the temporal pressures of dramatic theatre. While it is likely that some of the aesthetic preoccupations would have been explored on Garrick’s stage, especially his attempt to translate the two dimensions of the painting into a complete three-dimensional world, thereby advancing the achievements of the

Restoration stage somewhat in the process, his desires could not be fully realised

66 European Magazine from 1782, quoted in Altick, The Shows of London, p.121. 67 Bacon, The New Atlantis, (orig. publ. 1627) Ebooks, University of Adelaide Library, Adelaide, 2009, retrieved from http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/bacon/francis/b12n/ 10 July 2011.

113 technically there. Conversely, although the pictorial illusionism of the Eidophusikon could not be achieved on Garrick’s stage, we can assume that this is something like what he was aiming for. He wanted to create a theatrical event with a pictorial resemblance to nature. In the case of Lear this theatrical creation, the scene would be of a wild cataclysm that dramatised a crucial moment in Tate’s Lear where the good unite and triumph over the wicked, and also mimicked the natural dynamism of the meteors themselves within the technological limitations of the eighteenth-century theatre.

2.5. The Restoration of Shakespeare’s Storm on the Victorian Stage

The Victorian period is well known for its dazzling theatrical spectacles, but also, in 1838, Shakespeare’s play was restored to the London stage in full, for the first time since the 1670s. So, while the previous two sections have speculated on the creation and likely significance of Tate’s storm on the London stage, we now have to return to thinking about Shakespeare’s more complex storm and its significance on the nineteenth century stage. In this regard, the section is an important turning point in the historical overview of the storm in King Lear and in the argument of this chapter. As such, after a brief look at the staging of the storm in the nineteenth century, this section concludes with a reconsideration of Lamb’s famous reflection on the viability of staging

King Lear, in order to highlight the changing significance of the storm.

Due to the scale of the storm on the Victorian stage, it is sometimes characterised as the period of theatre history when focus was suddenly put into the staging of the storm. For example, J.S. Bratton claimed the 'creation of the storm in Act

III, indeed its staging generally, had not seemed until this period to be a particularly

114 important element in the presentation of the play'.68 What I have demonstrated contradicts Bratton’s claim. I have shown that effort and resources were always invested in the staging of stormy meteorological spectacle in King Lear. But the technologies that allowed the full, bright and mechanised production of the storm spectacle did not really exist until the nineteenth century. Although Bratton is not entirely accurate in her characterisation of the importance of the stormy spectacle, she logically responds to the unprecedented scale of Victorian spectacular theatre and also the wealth of information from archives, newspapers and even photographs, in comparison to earlier periods. But instead of seeing the Victorian spectacular theatre as altogether new, we should instead characterise the period as one where technological advances consolidated the accumulative aesthetic ambitions of theatre artists of the past two centuries. Victorian theatre artists were those who were lucky enough to have new technologies to exploit for their own theatrical advantage.

The technological developments brought about by the industrial revolution enable the spectacular scale of staged storms in the period. The development of gas lighting in the first decade of the nineteenth century 69 and its installation at the major theatres like Drury Lane, The Lyceum and Covent Garden by 1817 is the most

68 Bratton, King Lear, p.26. 69 If the desires for a particular theatrical spectacle on the part of both the artists and the audience, can be measured in part by the dangers involved in its production, then it is worth commenting on the gas used in Victorian Spectacular theatre. In usurping the need for toxic powders and deadly flammable substances, Gas technology brought with it new perils for all involved in the theatre: actors, technicians and audience. A Times article from the early nineteenth century reported that, ‘after having sat through a whole evening at the theatre, play goers felt a burning and prickling sensation in their eyes, a soreness in the throat, and a headache which lasted for several days afterward.’ These are the symptoms of minor gas poisoning which, according to Penzel, were ‘a direct result of the gas combustion which both depleted the air in the hall, and produced other potentially toxic by-products like carbonic acid’. The desire for the spectacle almost poisoned the thousands who attended the theatres. Clearly there was need for better ventilation in the theatre spaces and no doubt such technology would have developed. But, less than fifty years later, the invention of electric lighting and its speedy installation in the theatres would solve the problem anyway. F. Penzel, Theatre Lighting before Electricity, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 1978, p.42. 115 significant development.70 Greater control over the lights enabled the auditorium to be darkened and the stage space lightened. Thus, for the first time in history, there was clear physical delineation between the stage and the audience: a brightly lit stage picture to dazzle the darkened audience. At the same time as the stage got brighter, the forestage was virtually done away with and performances moved behind the proscenium arch, thereby delineating between the reality of the stage and the reality of the audience.71

Storms on the Victorian stage were excessive, cumbersome and spectacular. In the first half of the nineteenth century one of the last great actor-managers, Edmund

Kean, produced King Lear at Drury Lane (1820) and also toured his production to New

York (1820). Edmund Kean’s 1820 production is important for several reasons. King

Lear was banned from 1810 to 1820, due to sensitivities surrounding the madness of

King George III. Kean's production marks its return to the stage and also the first international tour of King Lear to New York.

Another reason why this production is important is due to its links with

Garrick’s designer de Loutherbourg. Robert Elliston, the designer of Kean’s production, drew inspiration for the staging of the storm scene directly from de Loutherbourg’s

Eidophusikon.72 Elliston’s painted backdrop for his King Lear set was entitled: ‘after de

Loutherbourg’s Storm on Land.’73 Thus, we can chart an aesthetic lineage from

Garrick’s ambition to create an animated pictorial spectacle, through de Loutherbourg’s post-Drury Lane Eidophusikon experiment, and to the technologically advanced live theatre of the mid-nineteenth century. What Elliston aimed to create in a live theatre

70 Ibid., p.36. 71 For an overview history of the playhouse in the Victorian Age see, Styan, pp.302-337; R. Jackson, Victorian Theatre: The Theatre in its Time, New Amsterdam Books, New York, 1994; N. Auerbach, ‘Theatre Before the Curtain’ in K. Powell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp.3-16. 72 Bratton, King Lear, p.28. 73 Ibid. 116 context, de Loutherbourg could only achieve when insulated from such temporal pressures. According to Bratton, the storm itself was created with ‘every infernal machine ever able to spit fire, spout rain or make thunder.’74 And the scale of the spectacle only continued to grow throughout the period. For example, Samuel Phelps’s

1845 production of Lear at Sadler's Wells, created a storm not only as an aesthetic experience, but also as a physical one. One critic reporting, ‘the wind whistles in the ears and blows in the faces of the audience, and the thunder rolls over the roof of the theatre.’75 In the Victorian age, the industrialised stage, with bright playing area and dimmed auditorium, brought the stage representation of the meteorological storm to its spectacular climax.

Alongside the spectacular storm, Shakespeare’s King Lear was restored to the stage. Although William Charles Macready is touted as something of a theatrical visionary for restoring the work, in fact all nineteenth-century versions of King Lear prior to this were hybrids of Tate and Shakespeare. Anything prior to Kean’s 1823 production had Tate’s dramatis personae, the happy ending and, following Garrick, an actor-manager’s own combination of Tate and Shakespeare’s dialogue. Between 1823 and 1838 various hybrid versions were staged and after 1838 it was largely

Shakespeare’s script that occupied the stage, with cuts as per ordinary editorial trends in the theatre. The main milestones in this gradual restoration are Edmund Kean’s 1823 revival of the tragic ending and, in 1838, Macready’s famous restoration of the Fool.

There was a sustained desire to restore Shakespeare’s work to the stage but some confusion about how to make sense of key aspects of the drama. For example, Edmund

Kean had already restored the tragic ending eighteen years earlier, but opted to leave out

74 Ibid. 75 Athaenaeum quoted in Bratton, King Lear, p.29. 117 the role of the Fool. However, for Macready to fulfil his grand ambition of fully restoring Shakespeare’s King Lear to the stage, he had no choice but to restore the role of the Fool. He did not quite know how to approach this task. This might seem strange to many of us today. We tend to think of the Fool as an essential character, providing, if nothing else, comic relief from all the horrors that unfold during the play. For Stanley

Cavell, the Fool brings important nuances to the drama: ‘part of the exquisite pain of the

Fool’s comedy is that, in riddling Lear with the truth of his condition he increases the very cause of that condition.’76 Indeed, Lear’s Fool is arguably as cruel as he is funny.

As H.F. Lippincott contends:

Like the audience … Lear expects to be diverted and entertained (by the Fool). But Shakespeare sends a fool of a different sort … a speaker of truth … who specifically counters the expectations of Lear and the audience. And it is clear from Lear’s reaction that the Fool plays a new and unwelcome role. By his third speech, Lear has threatened the Fool with the whip, and by the fourth, the Fool has become ‘a pestilential gall’.77

Regardless of how funny or cruel the Fool is, the character of the Fool functions to reshape our perspective of the actions of the main character, pointing out his mistakes, questioning him and challenging him. But this is not how Macready saw the role.

Macready almost did not restore Shakespeare’s play to the stage because he did not know what to make of the Fool. He described in his diary how a friend finally convinced him to do it:

Speaking to Willmott and Bartley about the part of the Fool in 'Lear', and mentioning my apprehensions that … we should be obliged to omit the part, I described the sort of fragile, hectic, beautiful-faced boy that he should be, and stated my belief that it never could be acted. Bartley observed that a woman should play it. I caught at the idea, and instantly exclaimed

76 S. Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love’, Must We Mean What We Say?, (orig. publ. 1969), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, (pp.267-353) p.287. 77 H. F. Lippincott, ‘King Lear and the Fools of Robert Armin’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vo. 26, No.3, 1975, p.249. 118 Miss P. Horton is the very person. I was delighted at the thought.78

The idea of casting a boy actor or female actress as the Fool did not draw on theatrical tradition. Women were not allowed on Shakespeare’s stage and the Fool was most likely not played by a boy actor. Indeed the Fool in Shakespeare’s company, The King’s

Men, was the other star player, Robert Armin. It is believed that Armin would have played the Fool at the play’s premiere. At that time he was over forty, slightly older than Burbage. In Shakespeare’s day, the role of the Fool in King Lear would have defied expectations about the role of Fools more generally because the figure’s cruelty poses a serious challenge to Lear’s authority as a character. But Macready had no desire to cast the Fool as a figure of equal stature and notoriety to Lear. Rather Macready thoroughly reimagined the Fool as a weaker and more fragile figure. Indeed, the way that Macready had to reimagine the role of Fool in relation to Lear is analogous to what begins to happen to the storm itself in this period. In the brightly lit Victorian theatres,

Macready was also able to emphasise the relative strength and weakness of the characters by means of controllable light. Macready's strong vision for old Lear could be accompanied by bright lights – likely by limelight, which Macready used for the first time in 1837 – while the weakened Fool could be relegated to the shadows.

The earliest existing critical interpretation of the storm, from Charles Lamb in

1810, differs vastly from what I argued was the storm’s likely significance in the early

1600s. Indeed, the contention here is that Lamb’s famous remark, that King Lear is

‘essentially impossible to be represented on stage’79 is an expression of the incomprehensibility of the cosmic dimensions of Shakespeare’s King Lear to the

78 F. Pollock and W.C. Macready (eds), Macready's Reminiscences, and Selections from His Diaries and Letters, in Two Volumes, Macmillian and Co, London, 1875, Vol II, p.97. 79 C. Lamb, ‘On the tragedies of Shakespeare: Considered With Reference To Their Fitness For Stage Representation’ (orig. publ. 1810) in J.M. Brown (ed.), The Portable Charles Lamb, Penguin Books, London, 1980, p.575. 119 Victorian thinker. Lamb’s famous remark is often taken out of context and used as a vague claim about the difficulty of staging Shakespeare’s poetically complex work as a whole.80 But it is actually part of a more specific complaint about the theatrical dilemma presented by Lear’s exposure to the storm:

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 real horrors of the elements than any actor can be to represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures.81

Explicating Lamb’s response to the staged storm can help us to understand more about the shifting significance of the storm and how actor-managers and audiences aimed to make sense of Shakespeare’s storm on the nineteenth- century stage.

Several critics have already given their interpretation of Lamb’s famous analysis. Harley Granville-Barker and Jonathan Bate have both argued that it was a response to trends in stagecraft and that he would not have held such an opinion if he was of an age when the staging was less excessive.82 They contend that the only reason

Lamb came to this conclusion was because of the machinery used to create the storm.

But this misses the crucial point that in 1810 Lamb could only have seen a version of

Tate’s Lear on stage and was actually speculating as to whether or not Shakespeare’s

80 For example, R.A. Foakes reiterates: ‘Hazlitt would have preferred to say nothing about a play that seemed, as Lamb said, “essentially impossible to be represented on a stage”’ (Hamlet Versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p.69.). J.J.Joughin states: ‘Charles Lamb, Lear approximates to a type of disaster “painful and disgusting”, “beyond all art” and “essentially impossible to be represented on a stage”’, ( ‘Lear’s Afterlife’ in Peter Holland (ed.), Shakespeare Survey 55: King Lear and its Afterlife, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p.68.). And Valerie Traub affirms: ‘Charles Lamb … concluded that “Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on [sic] stage”’, (‘The Nature of Norms in Early Modern England: Anatomy, Cartography and King Lear’, South Central Review, Vol.26, No.1-2, 2009, pp.42-81, p.81.). 81 Lamb, ‘On the tragedies of Shakespeare: Considered With Reference To Their Fitness For Stage Representation’, p.574. 82 H. Granville-Barker, ‘King Lear’ in Prefaces to Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, (orig. publ. 1927) Vol.. 1 of 5, B.T. Batsford, London, 1964, pp.267-270; J. Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989, pp.129-130. 120 play could or should be restored. Indeed, although Lamb likely attended J.P. Kemble’s

1810 production of King Lear, it is also the same year public performance of the play

(Tate or Shakespeare) was banned for a decade due to King George’s madness, thus no versions of the play were on stage for a while after the publication of his thoughts on the matter.

Thus, Lamb was not just responding to the nature of Victorian stagecraft, but also to the function and meaning of the storm in the drama itself. Lynne Bradley looks more holistically at the context of Lamb’s response to Lear and thus argues something very different:

The quality that struck Lamb as so unsuited to performance in Shakespeare’s plays is related to Shakespeare’s characterization. For Lamb, there was an interiority, or a psychological inwardness, to Shakespeare’s characters that could only be understood through the intimate concourse of reading in the privacy of the imagination … Only the mind of the reader and the privacy of the individual imagination could conceive of Lear’s psychological distress and the depth of his mental anguish. ‘What we see upon the stage is body and bodily action’, he wrote, ‘what we are conscious of in reading is almost exclusively the mind, and its movements’. 83

Bradley’s claim is more plausible than that of both Barker and Bate because of her attention to the particularities of Lamb’s context. Lamb read Shakespeare's King Lear, probably a conflation of Shakespeare’s Quarto and Folio, but the version he likely saw was Tate's. So Lamb’s opinion was not a universal claim about the complex genius of

Shakespeare’ poetry and its failure on stage, but rather a reflection on how difficult it would be to capture the psychological complexity of Lear on the spectacular Victorian stage.

83 L. Bradley, Adapting King Lear for the Stage, Ashgate, London, 2010, p.89. 121 What none of these critics pick up on is that Lamb’s main point of contention was the perceived disjunction between Lear and the storm. To fully understand Lamb’s point of view we need to look at a larger section of his analysis of the play:

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 him to take 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 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 of that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare.84

As Lynn Bradley noted, what Lamb read in Shakespeare's play was Lear’s psychological complexity, but when he watched Lear on stage all he saw is an old man

'contending with the fretful elements' in Tate’s version. Ultimately Lamb could not imagine how the stage, with such ‘contemptible machinery’, could represent Lear’s complex internal experience. As such, the reason that Lear was impossible to represent on stage was that Lear’s cosmological journey has lost its significance; instead of being radical, if hysterical, philosophising in the face of meteorological violence, for Lamb, his ravings in the storm looked as if they had no relation to the storm itself. Thus, for

Lamb, what the scene is about is not Lear’s relationship to the storm itself, but Lear’s relationship with himself.

There is more to be said about this shift in the critical understanding of Lear’s relationship to the storm, in Chapter Three I follow it up by exploring Harley Granville-

Barker’s understanding of Lamb’s criticism and in Chapter Four I reanimate the significance of the storm’s relationship with Lear’s complex psychological and physical situation. But the key point here is that when Macready finally restored Shakespeare’s

84 Lamb, ‘On the tragedies of Shakespeare: Considered With Reference To Their Fitness For Stage Representation’, p.574. 122 play to the stage, he incidentally restored the task of staging a storm that had no logical correspondence with the characters and ultimately lead to the downfall of the king.

While in the early seventeenth century this storm represented the changing relationship between king, kingdom and cosmos, by the nineteenth century the significance of this cosmological cataclysm was not immediately obvious to anyone. But narrative theatre relies on immediate intelligibility for its storytelling and, as such, if King Lear was to be staged its significance had to be reimagined and remade. What we will come to see on stage and criticism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is a thorough reimagining of the storm as a symbol that is not materially significant in itself.

2.6. The End of the Meteorological Storm

By the end of the nineteenth century, talk of making the meteors abstract metaphorical stage entities was beginning to bud. By the mid-twentieth century, there are examples of storms that aim for little to no resemblance with the meteors at all. As such, it is important to consider why, after centuries of aiming for a facsimile of a natural storm, things changed so dramatically. Bratton characterises this change as a form of artistic exhaustion: nineteenth-century theatre artists ‘exhausted the possibilities of mechanical imitation,’ and thus, ‘designers and directors turned to explore the possibilities of stylisation and the underlining or expansion of the storm’s symbolic significance’.85 It is important to note that the theatre reached a certain kind of aesthetic limit and theatre artists had to retreat from it. But also the theatre was about to be

‘replaced’ by the cinema, changing the nature of theatrical production forever. In fact, the creation of spectacular staged storms intersects in complex ways with the development of film in the late nineteenth century. Technological exhaustion or formal

85 Bratton, King Lear, p.29. 123 obsolescence is a general issue that affects all of the theatre arts at this historical juncture. With regards to King Lear in particular, the point we really need to consider is how the now nonsensical disjunction between the meteorological storm and Lear’s emotional condition intersects with the technological turning point. To conclude this overview of the storm on the pre-twentieth century stage I look at two storms in the nineteenth century, one that is central to the advent of film and one that responds to the newfound psychological complexity of Lear.

The ways in which the theatre arts paved the way for the development of cinema is well-known.86 In Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse, Judith

Buchanan argues the usual line that the origins of film can be seen in spectacular nineteenth-century theatre.87 But, as I mentioned briefly above, Hatchuel dates the origins of cinema back to the eighteenth century:

In (Garrick’s) production of King Lear, the storm scene was interspersed with thunder and bright flashes of lightning, and took place in a tormented landscape painted on shutters … the use of lighting simulated the faint light of the moon, the brightness of the sun and even volcanic eruptions … Garrick’s merging of naturalism and magic is somehow predictive of modern cinema.88

Hatchuel takes some licence with regards to her specific account of the storm in

Garrick’s Lear, which seems more like a description of the Wilson/McArdell image I included above that may have no correspondence with the stage picture at all. But even

86 The first critical study into the links between theatre and film was N. Vardac, Stage to Screen, Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1949. For more recent work see B. Brewster and L. Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and Early Feature Film, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997.There are even more esoteric links between these kinds of animated visions of the world. For example Iain McCalman argues that Eidophusikon ‘constituted a novel experiment in “virtual reality” two centuries before the computer-digitised technologies of Silicon Valley reified that term.’ in ‘The Virtual Infernal: Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Beckford and the Spectacle of the Sublime’, Romanticism on the Net, Vol.46, 2007, retrieved from http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2007/v/n46/016129ar.html on 26 April 2010. 87 J. Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, pp.23-24. 88 Hatchuel, Shakespeare, from Stage to Screen, p.8. 124 if Garrick’s storm did not specifically achieve this spectacle, her argument at least captures Garrick’s ambitions for a particularly dynamic pictorial mode of representation.

Generally speaking, we require the most sophisticated technologies to achieve the things farthest from our capacity or control. We cannot control or conjure a storm ourselves and therefore we require complex technologies in order to create one.

Following this logic, it is unsurprising that the desire to stage a meteorological storm played an important role in the research and development of early film technologies.

The magic lantern was an early form of image projector technology, the desire for which appears as early as 1666 in the diaries of Samuel Pepys.89 But, the lantern really came into its own during the Victorian age when gas technologies supplied it with an adequately bright light source. The magic lantern enabled a coloured image to be projected on a wall or curtain. This technology was enhanced by mounting the lantern to small train tracks, so the image could change in size and give the appearance of an object moving towards or away from an audience.90

But, a magic lantern used by Edmund Kean to create a vivid and chaotic storm illusion in his 1820 production links the theatrical storm to the development of film technologies.91 Kean’s production of King Lear is likely the first performance of Lear after the death of King George III and the return of the play to the stage after a ten-year hiatus. It is also the first performances of Lear in the gas-lit theatre, which was installed in the theatres from 1817 and the first recorded use of magic lantern in the theatre as well. As Altick describes how the magic lantern brought luminous vitality to the stage:

Overhead were revolving prismatic coloured transparencies, to emit a continually changing supernatural tint, and to add to the

89 R. Altick, The Shows of London, p.117. 90 T. Rees, Theatre Lighting in the Age of Gas, Society for Theatre Research, London, 1978, pp.81-84. 91 Ibid., 84. 125 unearthly character of the scene. King Lear would appear at one instant a beautiful pea-green, and the next sky-blue, and, in the event of a momentary cessation of the rotary motion of the magic lantern, his head would be purple and his legs Dutch-pink.92

While now such a bright colour scheme may appear decidedly unnatural or comic, then the effect successfully created the alternate reality of the theatrical illusion. According to one critic, ‘the celebrated storm scene was given on a principle quite new to the stage, increasing the effect and almost fixing the reality’.93 King Lear was bathed in multi-coloured light. This succeeded in making the stage appear to the audience as a different world. Thus, such theatrical illusions are clear precursors to the idea of a screen upon which an altogether distinct reality is projected. Although such theatrical spectacles aided the development of film technology, the art of the pictorial spectacle was ultimately usurped by the cinema because images of actual storms could be used to replace the clunky, cumbersome and expensive machines required to produce such a spectacle in the theatre.

At the same time as the cinema was taking over the theatre, changes started to appear in the theatre arts. The last Lear of the Victorian age, and the last Lear of a theatre before cinema, exemplifies the turn away from spectacular meteorological storm towards a new kind of stage picture and interest in the theatrical representation of Lear’s psychological complexity. Sir Henry Irving’s King Lear (1892) was legendary, but depending on whose account you read, it was either a groundbreaking success or a terrible failure. Sir Laurence Olivier uses Irving’s legacy as motivation to eclipse his fame and become the greatest actor of all time,94 while in the foreword of one of

Irving’s biographies, Sir John Gielgud proudly declares that Lear is one part that Irving

92 Ibid. 93 European Magazine quoted in Ibid., 85. 94 L. Olivier, On Acting, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1986, p.93. 126 failed to master.95 The failure is attributed, in part, to his prosaic interpretation of the play, moving away from the magical spectacle of Edmund Kean, and other Victorian actor-managers such as Charles Kean and William Charles Macready, towards a simpler stage image.96 Despite this Irving was praised for his realism: ‘No such realistic representation of the storm is within our recollection’.97

The audience saw within Irving’s production a new kind of reality in the design.

The way in which Irving achieved this was to harness the technologies of the Victorian spectacular theatre but to different ends. The designs for Irving’s Lear were drawn from sketches done by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Maddox Brown in 1844.98 According to

Robert Speaight: ‘these incorporated the imagery of the Pelican Daughter, and a theme from the Bayeux Tapestry. The figure of the King as a clown was reproduced for Lear’s awakening to sanity. The period suggested was after the departure of the Romans, and before the Norse invasions’.99 His storm still mimicked the meteors by means we have already explored, but the desire to probe the details of Lear’s experience in the storm through adorning the stage with historical and poetic symbols in the set design foreshadows the abstraction of the storm event itself. In Irving’s Lear there is a turn away from the external toward the internal, a dulling down of the bright meteorological spectacle and a move to reinterpret the cosmic dimensions of Shakespeare’s King Lear as psychological complexity.

2.7. Conclusion

95 J. Gielgud ‘Prologue’ in M. Bingham, Henry Irving and the Victorian Theatre, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1978, p.8. 96 Ibid. 97 Daily Chronicle quoted in A. Hughes, Henry Irving, Shakespearean, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981, p.132 98 R. Speaight, Shakespeare on the Stage: An Illustrated History of Shakespearean Performance, Collins, London, 1973, p.68. 99 Ibid. 127 From the earliest productions of King Lear until the late nineteenth century, artists staging the storm aimed for meteorological mimesis. There was a sustained evolution in the staging of the storm throughout this period and artists aimed to produce an increasingly dynamic meteorological event. The early productions of King Lear were open to the heavens and lit with fire. Actors were standing atop a thrust stage, surrounded by an audience on three sides. But consistent technological progress and changes to architectural styles significantly changed this stage picture. Gas lighting technologies were developed and painted backdrops, movable and mechanised set pieces, pulley systems and fly towers added to the designer’s tool box, all of which contributed to the dynamism of the meteorological stage picture. The auditorium was darkened and the stage brightened, the forestage shrank and the actor gradually moved entirely behind the proscenium arch and to a position within the scenery. When the animated stage picture had moved behind the fourth wall, the lights were dimmed over a hushed audience and the stage was finally set for the storm as a dynamic meteorological spectacle to play out.

At the same time as all the technological changes, there were significant changes in the cultural significance of the meteors themselves and the overall meaning of the storm event on the stage. In summary, in its early seventeenth-century context the storm in King Lear was an event that challenged the conventional dramatic function of the meteors. Rather than responding to the king, the storm forced the king to respond instead. The distinctiveness of this event was short-lived. While in 1606 the fiery display on the Globe and Blackfriars stages represented a king grappling with an age- old philosophical conundrum in the face of an indifferent storm, by 1681 Tate edited this dilemma out of the story and replaced it with a ‘storm of fortune’ that Lear triumphantly overcame. By 1810 Lamb’s primary critical interest was not in the storm’s

128 cosmic challenge to Lear, but rather in the internal psychological complexity of

Shakespeare’s protagonist rather than an age-old cosmological dilemma represented by the king’s exposure to the storm. In Irving’s 1892 production we see a retreat from the fully pictorial storm event in order to emphasise Lear’s private dilemma. Come the twentieth century, with the spectacular and pictorial stage all but exhausted and trumped by the development of cinema in 1895, and with the cosmological nuances of the play lost to the mutations of historical progress, the stage is set for the abstraction of the storm itself and the construction of the storm as a dramatic metaphor.

129 Chapter 3

Modern cataclysms from 1908 to 2011: Making sense of the storm in an infinite cosmos

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries literally hundreds, maybe thousands, of productions of King Lear were staged all around the world.1 Some of these are headed by renowned directors such as Orson Wells in New York (1956),2 Ingmar

Bergman in Stockholm (1984),3 Suzuki Tadashi in Japan (1984-2001)4 and Declan

Donnellan in London (2002).5 There were also several significant television versions of the play such as the collaboration between Peter Brook and Orson Welles in 1953,6 the

1982 BBC version directed by Jonathan Miller and starring Michael Hordern,7 the 1983 version directed by Michael Elliott and starring Laurence Olivier8 and the 1997 Richard

Eyre stage production, redesigned and filmed for television, starring Ian Holm.9 On top of these stage and television productions, there were at least three significant films,

1 For these and other twentieth-century productions, see A. Leggatt, King Lear: Shakespeare in Performance, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2004; B. Nightingale, ‘Some recent productions’, in J. Ogden and A. Scouten (eds), Lear from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism, Associated University Press, Cranbury, London and Mississauga, 1997, pp.226-246; G. Ioppolo, ‘Modern Performance: Traditional and Radical King Lear’, in A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on William Shakespeare’s King Lear, Routledge, London and New York, 2004, pp.81-94; J.S. Bratton, ‘King Lear in the twentieth century’, in King Lear: Plays in Performance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, pp.42-49. 2 On Welles’s King Lear, see http://www.wellesnet.com/learindex.htm, 27 February 2012. 3 On Bergman’s production, see E. Barba and J. R. Brandon, ‘Ingmar Bergman’s King Lear: A discussion with Eugenio Barba’, Asian Theatre Journal, Vol.3, No.2, 1986, pp.26-269. 4 On Suzuki’s production, see T. Yasunari, ‘Suzuki’s Shakespeare (II): King Lear’ in I. Carruthers and T. Yasunari (eds), The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp.247-254. 5 For a description of Donnellan’s production, see M. Billington, ‘King Lear’, retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2002/oct/10/theatre.artsfeatures1, 27 February 2012. 6 See F. W. Wadsworth, ‘“Sound and Fury”–King Lear on Television’, Quarterly Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol.8, No.3, 1954, pp.254-268. 7 See A. Leggatt, ‘Jonathan Miller and Michael Hordern’, in King Lear: Shakespeare in Performance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp.118-131. 8 See S. Isenberg, ‘A King Lear Notebook: Olivier’s first Shakespeare exclusively for television’, in J. Lusardi and J. Schlueter (eds), Reading Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear, Associated University Press, Cranbury, London and Mississauga, 1991, pp.194-196. 9 A. Leggatt, ‘Ian Holm and Richard Eyre’, in King Lear: Shakespeare in Performance, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2004, pp.144-167. 130 Peter Brook’s10 and Grigori Kozintsev’s,11 both from 197112, as well as Akira

Kurosawa’s Ran (1985). But in order to illustrate the changing significance of the storm, this chapter has whittled down this list and mentions just ten productions of

Shakespeare’s King Lear between 1908 and 2011, directed by: Max Reinhardt (1908),

Harley Granville-Barker (1940), George Devine (1955), Peter Brook (1962-1971),

Robert Wilson (1985-1990), Barrie Kosky (1998), Marion Potts (2010), Michael

Grandage (2010), David Farr (2010/2011), Benedict Andrews (2010/2011). These productions are not confined to a particular geographical region, but they have been selected for a very specific purpose. Most of these productions involve quite innovative designs for the storm and by thinking through the staging we reveal the changing significance of the storm in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: from the creation of the storm as a theatrical symbol to its gradual redesign as a meteorological spectacle.

By the start of the twentieth century our broad cultural understanding of the meteors had changed and this had a bearing on how artists approached staging the storm. By the twentieth century we were well along in the process of creating the modern Western worldview and, as S.K. Heninger said, ‘rain falls on the New Atlantis for reasons quite different from those which explained why divine grace showered the

City of God.’13 In the staging of the storm we see artists essentially remake the materiality of storm in the modern age as well. In the first section I show how productions in the early half of the twentieth century move away from the literal

10 See A. Davies, ‘Peter Brook’s King Lear and Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, in Filming Shakespeare’s Plays: The Adaptations of Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Peter Brook and Akira Kurosawa, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, pp.143-166. 11 See G. Kozintsev, King Lear: The Space of Tragedy, The Diary of a Film Director, Heinemann, London, 1977. 12 On King Lear on film and television, see K. Rothwell, ‘Representing King Lear on screen: from metatheatre to ‘meta-cinema’, in S. Wells (ed.), Shakespeare Survey 39: Shakespeare on Film and Television, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, pp.75-90; A. Davies, ‘King Lear on Film’, in J. Ogden and A. Scouten (eds), Lear from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism, Associated University Press, Cranbury, London and Mississauga, 1997, pp.247-266. 13 Heninger, Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, p.3. 131 representation of the meteors, towards stylisation and abstraction. This enabled artists to explore other themes in the play, such as psychological trauma or political chaos. In my first section I argue that the storm is essentially reimagined during this time as an extension of Lear’s internal complexity. Then, in the next three sections I look at ways in which the representation of the storm changes in the latter half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I show how theatre artists reconstructed the agency of the storm in the drama, and make sense of the storm itself in a late twentieth century context. The storm is cast as a political metaphor, exploded into a wild abstract spectacle and then finally conceived of as a storm once more. I argue that over the course of the century, theatre artists collectively reconstructed a modern cosmological setting for Shakespeare’s King Lear, and made the indifferent storm meaningful despite its lack of actual relationship with the cosmology of the infinite universe.

With regard to methodology, this chapter changes tack yet again. The previous chapter described technological advances in each period and revealed how those advances impacted upon the storm. Technological progress was central to the argument of that chapter, because theatre artists absolutely depended on incremental developments for their stage designs. Part of the argument in Chapter Two was that one of the main aesthetic goals in the period was to create a meteorological spectacle, which itself drove technological progress. But the drive to develop theatre technologies is less integral to the staged storm in the period covered in this chapter. Indeed, at least until the late twentieth century and a resurgence of interest in large-scale spectacle, the tendency in design moved away from the spectacular towards the simple and austere.

Specific technological innovations, therefore, have less bearing on the argument in this chapter: today we know that electricity and amplification are used to create and

132 manipulate light and sound on stage in a wide variety of ways.14 Conversely, in this chapter I draw on the range of archival resources available to the modern theatre scholar, from annotated prompt copies of scripts, production images, reviews to director’s notes and biographies of actors who played the title role, alongside critical reflections on King Lear. These methods are used to construct a conceptual snapshot of the aesthetic aims of the design and dramatic significance of the storm in the selected productions of King Lear.

3.1. The Symbolic Storm

The theorist and theatre designer E. Gordon Craig never officially designed a production of King Lear, but he made specific links between his vision for the modern theatre and the storm. His theatrical philosophy was clearly outlined in 'The Art of the

Theatre: The First Dialogue: an expert and a playgoer conversing' (1905) in which he used a dialogic form to contrast his new philosophy from old conventions and expectations. He used the voice of the 'playgoer' to set up the received perspective on the theatre arts and the voice of the 'stage-director' to ventriloquise his new philosophy.

In this example, the stage-director ventriloquises Craig’s definition of the theatre arts:

The Art of the Theatre is neither acting nor the place, it is not the scene nor the dance, but it consists of all the elements of which these things are composed: action, which is the very spirit of acting; words, which are the body of the play; line and colour, which are the very heart of a scene; rhythm, which is the very essence of dance.15

14 On theatre technology in the twentieth century, see S. Archer, C. Gendrich and W. Hood, Theatre: its Art and Craft, Rowman and Littlefield, London, 2009; C. Baugh, Theatre, Performance and Technology: the Development of Sceneography in the Twentieth Century, Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2005; G. Izenour, Theater Technology, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1996. 15 E. Gordon Craig, 'The art of the theatre (1st dialogue)', in On the Art of the Theatre, (orig. publ. 1911) F. Chamberlain (ed.), Routledge, London and New York, 2009, p.73. 133 Here Craig advocated stripping theatre back to its basic elements in order to animate more philosophical or conceptual dimensions of the dramatic text.

Although Craig never actually designed a production of King Lear that reached the stage, he did create designs for the play and he developed a concept of how the storm might be staged. In a note on one of his sketches, he explained how his philosophies might inform a staging of the storm:

If we should have no snowstorm [sic] visualised, but only the man making his symbolical gestures which would suggest to us a man fighting against the elements ... this would be better ... Following that line of argument in its logical sequence, then, would it not be still more near to art if we had no man, but only movements of some intangible material which could suggest the movements of which the soul of man makes battling against the soul of nature.16

What Craig described was an abstract image of man and the elements; this image eschews pictorial representation and communicates the emotional and philosophical kernel of the dramatic action. His 1920 woodcut (Illus. 11) depicts an abstract storm of lines and shapes rather than a pictorial setting with meteorological elements; we see shadowy human bodies struggling against this abstract force. As Christopher Innes has pointed out, the key word in Craig’s interpretation of the storm was ‘intangible’.17

Max Reinhardt adopted Craig’s non-naturalistic aesthetic with regard to the storm in his 1908 König Lear at the Deutches Theater in Berlin.18 To this point, I have focussed exclusively on English versions of the play. I have chosen to look here at

Reinhardt’s Berlin production, as opposed to the first English production in the twentieth century (Norman McKinnell, 1909) because of Reinhardt's desire to design

King Lear in light of Craig's philosophical vision. As J.L. Styan observes, Reinhardt

16 Quoted in C. Innes, Edward Gordon Craig, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p.180. 17 Ibid. 18 Strangely, Reinhardt’s Lear has received comparatively little critical attention. Reinhardt’s archives are held at Binghamton University Library, SUNY Binghamton, http://library.binghamton.edu/specialcollections/reinhardt.html. 134

Illus.11: ‘The Storm in King Lear’, E. Gordon Craig, woodcut, 1920.

was ‘among the first directors to approach the great plays with eyes unclouded by the traditional staging of the Victorian age’.19 So in Reinhardt's work we see a very clear break with the Victorian spectacle. It would take a little longer for the shock of the new theatre to have any significant impact on the aesthetics of mainstream British

19 J.L. Styan, Max Reinhardt, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982, p.51. 135 productions of Shakespeare. Furthermore, although Reinhardt was known as a prolific director of contemporary plays by the Symbolist playwright Maeterlinck, and

Expressionists Strindberg and Wedekind, he regarded Shakespeare as the greatest playwright of all time, ‘an incomparable piece of good luck that has befallen the theatre’.20 Reinhardt saw the revival and redesign of older theatrical texts, in particular

Shakespeare, as an important task for the development of modern theatre.21 Henry

Kahane describes Reinhardt's method for reimagining the classics in this way:

The new art of the stage picture did away with the scientifically designed historic restoration in favour of the artist’s free vision of past periods, thus shifting the focus from accurate objectivity to a recreation of the spirit of the whole period in question. Reinhardt developed this … approach with unique virtuosity; it became a hallmark of his style.22

So despite the fact that Craig turned down Reinhardt’s offer to design King Lear,

Reinhardt directed the production with Craig’s philosophies in mind anyway.23

The main difficulty in working with Craig’s philosophies is in translating his abstract ideas into the functional design for a play with a conventional dramatic narrative. The design for Reinhardt’s King Lear – created eventually by Karl Czeschka

– used an almost bare stage with an austere unadorned castle façade, made to look like concrete.24 Reinhardt drew upon new technologies such as electric lighting in order to animate the playing space. Despite an austere stage design that made no clear reference to any specific historical place or time, thunder and lightning (Donner und Blitz) were still created. Illustration 12 shows a heavily annotated and somewhat illegible page of

Reinhardt’s 1908 prompt copy. The purple annotation indicates that a Donner sound

20 Quoted in Styan, ibid. 21 H, Kahane, ‘Max Reinhardt's Total Theatre: A Centenary Lecture’, Comparative Literature Studies, Vol.12, No.3, 1975, (pp.323-337) p.327. 22 Ibid., p.325. 23 Styan, Max Reinhardt, p.53. 24 Ibid. 136

Illus. 12: Page from Reinhardt’s König Lear promptbook, 1908.

effect interrupted Lear’s first speech in 3.2. The purple Donner is preceded by a blue

Blitz. A word in blue that seems to be Gewitter (thunderstorm) precedes the start of scene 2. To its left in red is the word Sturm (storm). Unfortunately the archives provide

137 no information regarding the way in which the thunderstorm was generated. Possibly it was created acoustically with sheets of metal rattled in the same way as they were in the

Eidophusikon or through a recorded sound effect played on a phonograph. But ultimately, although the design was underpinned by innovative theatre philosophy, the resulting stage storm was not entirely abstract. But it is important to note that

Reinhardt’s goal, and what he was therefore trying to communicate with the audience, is that the storm reflected the relationship between ‘man’ and ‘nature’ in an abstract and symbolic manner. But this was just the first experiment in making symbols out of the meteors in order to focus on the human drama, and this experimental interpretation of the storm gained momentum throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

In 1940, Harley Granville-Barker specifically aimed to create the storm as a theatrical extension of Lear’s psychological complexity. He came out of retirement to direct a production that played at London’s Old Vic just before the theatre was badly damaged in the Blitz, the Luftwaffe rather than the German stage direction for lightning forcing its closure for a year.25 Granville-Barker’s direction and design of King Lear reflected his reading of the play as expressed over a decade earlier in his Prefaces to

Shakespeare (1927). Rather than trying, like Reinhardt after Craig, to create a stage picture where the soul of man came into conflict with the soul of nature, Granville-

Barker aimed to theatricalise the internal conflict of an individual man. This is how most people still understand the storm today. His preface to Lear is interesting not only because it presents an influential interpretation of the meaning and purpose of the storm, but also – despite its anachronistic claims – because it continues to be recognised as one of the most important modern criticisms of the play. Incidentally, these same

25 C. Dymkowski, Harley Granville-Barker: A Preface to Modern Shakespeare, Folger Books, Associated University Press, Washington, 1986, p.129. 138 anachronisms provide us with insight into the changing cultural significance of the meteors in the twentieth century.

Granville-Barker began his preface by debunking Lamb’s and Bradley’s famous claims that King Lear was unstageable. He argued instead that it was not the play itself, but the way in which it had been staged that gave rise to such claims in the first place.26

In the previous chapter, I explored Lamb’s meditation on King Lear. The reason he thought it could not be staged was that the stormy spectacle emphasised Lear’s physical weakness and distracted our attention from Lear’s psychological complexity.27

Granville-Barker conceded that because Lamb was writing at a time when pictorial spectacle was the order of the day, it was perfectly understandable that he did not think the play could be staged. Lamb’s main point was that the staging of the storm thwarted our capacity to understand the complexity of Lear’s internal dilemma. Conversely,

Granville-Barker believed that King Lear could indeed be staged, but that the key was in designing the storm scenes to reflect his internal dilemma.

To do this he insisted that a design was required that took emphasis away from the storm itself and worked instead to represent Lear’s interior struggle. A symbolic design, he argued, was what Shakespeare had in mind for the storm scenes. He insisted that what went wrong with Lear in the nineteenth century, and the reason why Lamb could not envisage it on stage, was that the relationship between the text and the stage for which it was originally intended had been forgotten:

In this hardest of tasks – the showing of Lear’s agony, his spiritual death and resurrection – we find Shakespeare relying very naturally upon his strongest weapon … the weapon of dramatic

26 H. Granville-Barker, ‘King Lear’ in Prefaces to Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, (orig. publ. 1927) Vol.. 1 of 5, B.T. Batsford, London, 1964, p.260. 27 Bradley’s opinion was similar, but Granville-Barker was more sympathetic to Lamb’s point of view. He argued that Bradley’s belief that King Lear could not be staged was based upon his own academic prejudice, but that Lamb’s judgment was simply clouded by his historical context; Ibid., p.261-264. 139 poetry. He has, truly, few others of any account. In the storm- scenes the shaking of the thunder-sheet will not greatly stir us … in impressive scenery, he has none.28

If only because it is hard to take issue with the claim that dramatic poetry was one of

Shakespeare’s strengths, Granville-Barker’s argument is compelling. Likewise the fact that in the early performances, when understood to be outside on a barren landscape,

Lear would most likely have been on an entirely bare stage. But, as I argued in Chapter

One, the cosmological significance of the storm meant that the storm itself was an important feature of these scenes, and represented as such with the fiery spectacular technologies of the early modern stage.

But resting on the assumption that the staged storm was a minor event in the early modern theatre, Granville-Barker argued that the scenes were designed solely for the purposes of Lear’s self-reflection:

The storm is not in itself … dramatically important, only its effect upon Lear. How, then, to give it enough magnificence to impress him, yet keep it from rivalling him? Why, by identifying the storm with him, setting the actor to impersonate both Lear and – reflected in Lear – the storm.29

This reading removes any meaningful or functional aspect in the storm, beyond its significance for Lear: the storm is neither in the external world, nor is it the indifferent cosmos; rather the storm is within Lear.

This is quite a logical conclusion, given the cultural significance of the weather by 1940. When Granville-Barker came to direct King Lear, the dimensions of the storm that were central to Shakespeare’s version of the Lear story were no longer relevant. In

1940, meteorology was a militarised, industrialised and instrumentalised science.

Meteorologists adopted the task of predicting the weather so that military operations, business activities or everyday lives might be better organised around the variability of

28 Ibid., 266. 29 Ibid. 140 the weather. Metaphysical questions about the relationship between the meteors and ourselves were relegated to the realm of superstition.30 The idea that the storm should be

‘reflected in Lear’ was Granville-Barker’s way of making sense of an event in which the cosmological and cultural understanding of the weather that gave the storm scenes their dramatic and poetic significance had long been forgotten.

His staging shifted emphasis away from the tumult of the storm itself and focussed on Lear’s mental cataclysm.31 Lear, played by John Gielgud, and the Fool were placed on a virtually black stage, lit only with spotlights. Nothing else was visible on the stage. The storm was evoked quite simply by means of recorded sound effects of thunder and wind. Granville-Barker was criticised for this move, because the abstraction in staging did not otherwise blend with his use of traditional acting and realistic sound effects.32 But, as Christine Dymkowski argues, the director’s point was not to ignore the storm's tumult altogether but rather to create a focus on Lear.33 Despite some criticisms of aesthetic incoherence, the production was well received. Those who liked the production saw it as an educated and intelligent version of the play: ‘This production is one of the glories of the Shakespearean stage because of [Granville-Barker’s] understanding of the text’, claimed one reviewer.34 Gielgud was seen to have delivered an ‘Olympian performance’.35

This attempt to redesign the Lear world in order to make sense of the storm in the modern context continued in George Devine’s second production of King Lear in

30 For a sociological study of the professional work of a meteorologist and the cultural application of the modern science of meteorology see G. Fine, Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Culture of Prediction, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007. 31 This section is indebted to Christine Dymkowski, Harley Granville-Barker: A Preface to Modern Shakespeare (1986), pp.180-190, who describes the storm sequence at length. 32 Dymkowski, Harley Granville-Barker, p.183. 33 Ibid., p.181. 34 Quoted in R. Speaight, Shakespeare on the Stage: An Illustrated History of Shakespearian Performance, Collins, London, 1973, p.136. 35 London Times review quoted in W. Babula, Shakespeare in Production, 1935-1987: A Selective Catalogue, Garland, London and New York, 1981, p.135. 141 1955. Not only did he make the meteorological tumult of the storm scenes symbolic, but also the entire setting of the play. Like Granville-Barker, Devine cast Gielgud as Lear, but he hired the Japanese-American sculptor and architect Isamu Noguchi to design the set and costumes. In other words, he cast a traditional Shakespearean actor in the title role and employed an experimental designer to construct the stage picture. Devine had a deeply conceptual approach to the dramatic action. He wanted this to be reflected in the design. His vision was for

a permanent surround framing a series of fluid locations which, above all, would enable the play to expand beyond the confines of representational scenery … costumes free of historical associations ... [and] a symphonic division of the play into three movements.

Noguchi’s design consisted in ‘the elemental shapes of the universe: egg-forms, triangular caverns, air born prisms, a multifaceted ramp, and other mobile abstract pieces’. Furthermore, during the storm scenes these elemental forms were made to move in time with the action of the play text: ‘an ominous group of black shapes [that] dilated and contracted like the iris of an eye according to mood and rhythm’.36 Furthermore,

Noguchi’s costumes lacked the traditional signifiers of monarchical hierarchy, such as crowns and ermine. Pictorialism was replaced by simple colour, line and shape geared towards a symbolic representation of the play’s affective dimension, a context in which the storm was seen as a kind of primal chaos, both a psychological and cosmological, rather than a specifically meteorological, event (Illus. 13).

36 I. Wardle, The Theatre of George Devine, Jonathan Cape, London, 1978, p.153. 142

Illus. 13: Isamu Noguchi’s design model for 3.4.

The production was not well received, reviewers seeing the décor and costumes as simply distracting.37 Gielgud too regarded the production as a complete failure, blaming Devine for his interpretation and stranglehold over the artistic vision.

According to some reviewers, he reverted to his classical style of acting as soon as the public came in.38 The result, wrote Irving Wardle, was ‘a universal poetic setting with orthodox English classical acting going on inside it’.39 In short, the production failed dramatically and aesthetically. What is interesting, however, about the disjunction between Devine’s vision and Gielgud’s performance is that it mirrored the central tension within the play. The world is not meant to align with Lear and the conflict between actor and director can be read in part as an expression of this. There is no

37 ‘Stage is strewn with geometric or symbolic shapes. Fool’s face is diamond-patterned. Décor very distracting’, J.C. Trewin, Shakespeare on the English Stage in Babula, p.138; ‘Confusing setting and distracting costumes’, Anonymous, London Times, in Babula, p.138. 38 Wardle, p.153. 39 Ibid., p.154. 143 disjunction when the storm is staged as an extension of Lear’s mind. But here the criticism of the disjunction between the dramatic setting and the dramatic action is the same as Lear’s complaint about the storm: what the actor and the audience wanted was coherence between his character and the world, but the production failed to deliver one.

Conversely, Devine’s initial vision was more coherent insofar as he wanted Gielgud to be more aligned with the abstract set than Gielgud was prepared to be. While the production was a critical failure, both Granville-Barker and Devine had similarly reconfigured the significance of the storm scenes to fit a modern context.

Reinhardt, Granville-Barker and Devine’s productions may have had different theoretical foundations, but when looked at together they constitute a broader cultural trend in the staging of the storm. Artists tended away from pictorialism, toward abstraction, symbolism, austerity of design and, ultimately, they understood the storm as a metaphor for Lear’s mind or the human condition more generally.

The storms as interpreted by these three directors differ radically from those witnessed by earlier nineteenth-century audiences. Nor were they isolated examples of a new reading. It is worth mentioning that the human body itself was used in the staging of the storm scene in productions of The Tempest around that time. Robert Atkins’s

1934 production, for instance, dramatised the storm by means of a ‘large number of ladies [as] impermanent waves … undulat[ing] with conviction.’40 Atkins again in 1938 and Michael Benthall in 1951 used women dancing to evoke the tumult of the storm.41

Both these suggest similar movement away from the meteors, towards abstract ideas of tumult and chaos. In King Lear, the meteors were no longer cosmic signs but metaphors within an entirely human story. The storm was now an expression of human tumult,

40 Review quoted in C. Dymkowski, The Tempest: Shakespeare in Production, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, p.75. 41 Ibid. 144 human systems and human relations. That the human body was also used to represent the storm in The Tempest shows that the movement away from the pictorial representation of the meteors was not isolated to productions of King Lear.

The tendency away from pictorialism and towards symbolism or abstraction culminated in the second half of the twentieth century, when King Lear underwent the dark influence of the Absurdists. Peter Brook’s 1962 and 196442 and Martin L. Platt’s

197643 productions were described by reviewers as in some way embodying an existentialist philosophy and a particularly Beckettian aesthetic. Other productions, such as those of Trevor Nunn in 196844 and 1977,45 may not have specifically inspired comparison with the bleak stage world of Samuel Beckett, but were nonetheless performed on a bare stage with an undefinable universal setting. The now famous design of Waiting for Godot was a grey, almost completely bare stage, with a seemingly dead tree in the centre. Most of Beckett’s plays were designed in a similar manner: bleak, grey and consciously excluding the dynamism of the natural world. 46 For example, in Endgame the characters are hermetically sealed in a room and obliged to climb a ladder in order to see the natural world outside. By excluding nature, Beckett was able to isolate the complex psychological relations between the characters. So, with elaborate nineteenth-century pictorialism long forgotten, and with the tumultuousness of the storm turned into metaphor, mid-to-late twentieth-century productions of King Lear started to mimic this Beckettian austerity (Illus. 14-17).

42 ‘Drawing his inspiration from Samuel Beckett, Brook has superimposed the world of Waiting for Godot on that of Lear.?’ Robert Brustein, New Republic in Babula, p.142. 43 ‘The production reflects the Jan Kott-Peter Brook stark vision of the play.’ C. McGinnis Kay, Shakespeare Quarterly, Ibid., p.148. 44 ‘Performed on a bare stage to lend universality to the production’, R. Speaight, Shakespeare Quarterly, Ibid., p.143. 45 ‘The stage (was) bare with a semicircular back wall intermittently pierced by doors.’ J.S. Bost, Educational Theatre Journal, Ibid., p.150. 46 On the stage aesthetics of Beckett, see L. Essif, Empty Figure on an Empty Stage: The Theatre of Samuel Beckett and his Generation, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2001; J. Kalb, Beckett in Performance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991. 145

Illus. 14 (top left): The opening scene of Peter Brook’s 1962 King Lear Illus. 15 (top right): Lear and Gloucester in Brook’s 1971 film of King Lear Illus. 16 (bottom right): Roger Blin as Hamm in the 1957 Paris production of Beckett’s Fin de Partie (Endgame) Illus.17 (bottom left): The opening scene of Roger Blin’s 1957 Paris production of Beckett’s Fin de Partie (Endgame).

This trend towards austerity in the stage design of King Lear reflected a broad shift in the critical understanding of the play. The publication of Jan Kott’s Shakespeare

Our Contemporary in 1964 and Maynard Mack’s King Lear in Our Time in 1966

146 catalysed this shift. Both texts emphasise the bleak vision dramatized by Shakespeare in

King Lear and linked it to the political and cultural situation in Britain and Europe in the sixties.47 R.A. Foakes analysed the critical shift retrospectively in Hamlet versus

Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art (1993):

King Lear changed its nature almost overnight: the main tradition of criticism up to the 1950s had interpreted the play as concerned with Lear’s pilgrimage to redemption, as he finds himself and is ‘saved’ at the end, but in the 1960s the play became Shakespeare’s bleakest and most despairing vision of suffering.48

Moreover, Foakes argues, at this time Lear supplanted Hamlet as Shakespeare’s greatest work, certainly the tragedy to which the late twentieth century was most politically attuned. Although we are likely to be more sceptical of the idea of an artwork’s essential greatness today, the general implication was that a particular play was recognised and championed by many as a superlative cultural object with broad historical relevance:

After 1960 ... King Lear has come to seem richly significant in political terms, in a world in which old men have held on to and abused power, often in corrupt and arbitrary ways; in the same period Hamlet has lost much of its political relevance, as liberal intellectuals have steadily been marginalized in Britain and in the United States.49

How theatre artists represented Lear’s bleak vision of human suffering on stage is important to understand. If a single production can be said to have comprehensively captured the shift in the cultural meaning of the play, aesthetically and philosophically, it is that of Peter Brook for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962. Brook built upon half a century of aesthetic experimentation in the representation of the play. Although the production was associated with Beckett aesthetically, there is more to Brook’s storm

47J. Kott, ‘King Lear or Endgame’, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 2nd edn, Methuen, London, 1967; M. Mack, King Lear in Our Time, Methuen, London, 1966. 48R.A. Foakes, Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p.6. 49Ibid. 147 than just psychological metaphor. His production built on the techniques of the early twentieth-century theatre and further complicates our understanding of the storm in a modern context.

3.2. The Storm as a Chorus

Peter Brook’s 1962 production, with Paul Scofield in the title role, and his subsequent 1971 film, based on the production, coincided with this radical change in the cultural understanding of the play. Foakes mentions Brook’s stage production, but does not give it credit for changing the cultural understanding of the play.50 It was nevertheless a landmark event, something Brook’s assistant director Charles Marowitz lamented: ‘The show had become not an imaginative, brilliantly-executed, somewhat flawed and erratic Shakespearean production, but a “milestone”’.51 Brook’s Lear was the effect of a larger cultural process, not the primary cause of the radical shift at the hands of one director’s genius. Despite the need to approach the success of the production with scepticism,52 it is useful to look at how Brook’s staging captured the zeitgeist so successfully and, in particular, how his storm was conceived of within it.

The entire production worked to undermine the redemptive capacity of the play.

In Chapter One I showed how Shakespeare's rewriting of King Lear was ambiguous. In the folk tales, the histories and the anonymous play, the King’s position is ultimately validated by his restoration to the throne and/or reunion with his good daughter.

50 Foakes, Hamlet versus Lear, pp.59-65. 51 C. Marowitz, ‘Lear Log’, Tulane Drama Review, Vol.8, No.2, 1963, (pp.103-121) p.121. 52 For an article that takes Marowitz’s lamentation further and criticizes Brook’s production as a misreading of the play, see L. Lieblien, ‘Jan Kott, Peter Brook, and King Lear’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Vol.1, No.2, 1987, pp.39-49. 148

Illus.18: Paul Scofield as King Lear, 1962 and 1971

In Shakespeare’s play Lear's experience with the indifferent storm, his failed reunion with Cordelia and his death from grief undermine this certainty. Such uncertainty might cause us to reflect upon Lear's errors and consider the king as the agent of his own destruction. But his isolation, exposure and ultimate failure might make us sympathise with Lear and despise Goneril and Regan more powerfully. In

149 other words, our desire for his vindication and restoration is possibly made more fervent because it is withheld. Nahum Tate’s adaptation removed any ambiguity and for over a century and a half there was only one way of reading Lear’s situation: he was morally right and vindicated in the end. But the image of Scofield on stage (Illus. 18) is quite the opposite of the Wilson/McArdell image of Garrick as Lear (Illus. 10), in which a single ray of sunlight penetrates the storm clouds to illuminate Garrick’s triumphant face. By the 1960s, Scofield’s troubled demeanour and sweaty and furrowed brow theatricalised a very different side of Lear’s character.

The set, costumes and performance styles were some of the strategies Brook used in the creation of his bleak vision, but the storm was also integral to his creation of a dark, violent and unforgiving Lear world. The thunder was created by large sheets of rusty metal flown into view from above. Vigorously shaken during the storm scenes, these produced loud thunderous sounds as well as adding to the bleak modernist design of the set. This was similar to the way thunder was produced in the Eidophusikon, but in

Brook’s production the metal sheets were visible to the audience and thus the meaning of the thunder was quite different. By exposing the artificiality of the sound by unmasking the way in which it is made in the manner of Brecht, the design reveals the artifice of the meteors. But also, by virtue of their aesthetic coherence with the rest of the production, the rusty thunder sheets became a significant feature of the built environment of the Lear world. The thunder might have been read as meteors rumbling, of course, but it might just as easily have been the very corridors of power rattling.

Indeed, by having the human agent shaking the sheets clearly visible, Brook seemed to be dramatising Brecht’s belief that the man-made world is the cause of political strife.

150

Illus. 19: A page from the prompt copy of the 1962 production, showing cues for the ‘flys’ at the end of 2.2 and the beginning of rolling thunder ‘as sheets rumble’.

151 The metal sheets suggest that both the shaking of the stage world – political and meteorological – is entirely man-made. In Brook’s production, there was no non-human presence on the stage at all.

These elements alone, however, were not enough to swing the overall meaning of the play from possibly redemptive to unequivocally bleak. Indeed, in Brecht’s own hands the rattling of the man-made world would have suggested the possibility of change or reconstruction. Thus, something more significant had to take place at the level of the dramatic action itself: thwarting any possibility of catharsis, an additional storm was heard to rumble as the production ended. Marowitz explains how his idea was implemented:

One of the problems with Lear is that like all great tragedies, it produces a catharsis. The audience leaves the play shaken but reassured. To remove the tint of sympathy usually found at the end of the Blinding Scene, Brook cut Cornwall’s servants and their commiseration of Gloucester’s fate … At the end of the play, the threat of a reassuring catharsis is even greater. I suggested that, instead of the silence and repose that another storm—a greater storm—was on the way. Once the final lines had been spoken the thunder could clamour greater than ever before. Brook seconded the idea, but instead of an overpowering storm, preferred a faint, dull rumbling which would suggest something more ominous and less explicit.53

The decision to cut the servants’ display of sympathy for Gloucester and also to have storm clouds gather at the end contributed to the accumulative meaning of the tragedy, by shifting the telos from potentially hopeful to unequivocally bleak.

There are two main reasons why the second storm helps to thwart the redemptive and cathartic ending. The rumbles of thunder at the end militate against any notion that Lear is vindicated by Albany and Edgar's survival. Indicators of future strife, not of peace and calm, they undermine any suggestion that, by obeying the ‘weight of this sad time’, Albany and Edgar will learn from Lear's mistakes. If anything the

53 Marowitz, ‘Lear Log’, pp.113-114. 152 imminent storm suggests historical repetition: they will make the same mistakes as Lear again. It is as though Brook needed to remind his audience that the storm was not a sign of something good, but rather a relentlessly destructive force that the surviving characters will have to keep grappling with.

Brook’s production was incredibly influential. This version of Lear premiered at

Stratford-upon-Avon in 1962, toured to New York and then returned for a season in

London in 1964. Crucially, several years later Brook reworked his interpretation of the play for the cinema. Unlike his earlier attempt at filming the play in 1953, a very theatrical television version with Orson Welles in the title role, his 1971 film engaged the camera in storytelling, dramatised the same bleak vision of the play as embodied in the stage production, but in cinematic terms.54 While the play and the film are essentially separate artistic phenomena, when thinking about the broader cultural impression of King Lear, the two should be viewed together as part of a large-scale decade-long Lear project, one that was integral to reshaping the broad cultural impression of the Lear story. Brook's reading of the play was influenced by that of

Polish critic Jan Kott, whose Shakespeare Our Contemporary, originally published in

1964, included a foreword by Brook. Seeing the play in the light of Beckett’s worldview – his essay on the play is entitled ‘King Lear or Endgame’ – Kott

54 The film is no more cathartic than the stage production. The deaths of all three daughters, who die offstage in the play, are shown on screen. Goneril’s end is triggered by the death of Edmund; after receiving the news of Edmund's death, all hope of another life seems to vanish for Goneril and she kills her sister by violently pushing her to the ground, then kills herself by smashing her head against a large rock. Then, in a short, semi-close up shot and with a neck- snapping sound effect, we see Cordelia’s execution. The final lines, delivered by Edgar, are not reverentially delivered over Lear’s dead body but rather interspersed with shots of Lear slowly falling to the ground dying. On Brook’s cinematic strategies, see R. B. Parker, ‘The Use of Mise-en-Scene in Three Films of King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol.42, No.1, 1991, pp.75-90. 153 emphasised its coldness and arbitrary cruelty and argued that it was a play the modern theatre was better equipped to handle than any age since Shakespeare’s own.55

The meaning of the storm in Brook’s production differed markedly from that of earlier twentieth-century representations. Indeed, I contend that his representation of the storm actually marks a turning point in modern representations of the play as a whole, one in which the meteors begin to regain meaning in themselves again. Although

Brook’s design was bleak and his staging of the storm did not aim for meteorological verisimilitude, the overall meaning was actually quite different from that of the abstract or metaphoric storms of the early twentieth century. Alexander Leggatt recalls that ‘the storm scene worked not just because it abandoned the realism that was bound to fail in any case, but because it treated Lear’s encounter with the storm not as an exercise in special effects but as a dialogue’.56 As the annotations to 3.2 in the 1962 prompt copy indicate (Illus. 19), thunder and lightning effects consistently punctuate Lear’s dialogue.

Clearly, they are designed to work in rhythmic response to Lear’s dialogue. This particular staging decision has been read in two ways. Bratton argues that Lear’s speeches in the storm are deeply psychological: he was able to compete with the storm because the power of the storm was within him.57 On the other hand, Jeffrey Kahan hypothesises that ‘Brook used the storm as a sort of chorus to Lear’58 – by which, I assume, he means a chorus as in an ancient Greek play. If so, Kahan implies something fundamentally different from Bratton. I am more inclined to agree with him. As

Gwilym Jones points out, 'Lear is never alone on the stage. This is the one title role in

Shakespeare's tragedies which has no soliloquies.'59 Indeed, part of Lear's tragedy is that

55 P. Brook, ‘Preface’ in J. Kott, Shakespeare our Contemporary, 1967, pp.x. 56 Leggatt, King Lear, p.38. 57 J.S. Bratton, King Lear, p.30 58 J. Kahan ‘Introduction’, King Lear: New Critical Essays, Routledge, London and New York, 2008, p.70. 59 Jones, , p.79. 154 he tries to operate autonomously after he has made himself entirely dependent on others. The storm as chorus ultimately serves to show his lack of independence. And indeed, by the end of the storm he is giving some thought to those he had previously ignored, the ‘poor naked wretches’ (3.4.28), of whom he took too little care.

To suggest that Brook saw the storm as a chorus proposes something quite complex about the material presence of the storm itself, its significance for Lear and function in the play as a whole. Kott argues that the cruelty of the play is

‘philosophical’,60 that is to say, it is conceptual not material cruelty, one to which the non-pictorial experimental space of the modern stage is ideally suited. But the idea of the storm as chorus gives the event a collective force that may aim to communicate philosophical ideas, but does so in a physical manner. Thus the idea of the storm as a chorus reanimates a practical and forceful dramatic function in the storm itself, not just as a symbol for Lear’s situation.

To think of the storm as chorus reinforces the distinction between what the storm is itself and what it means for King Lear. The chorus in Greek drama serves the dual role of framing and commenting on the main action, a collective force of individuals who exist outside the central action, and yet shed light upon it. According to

Nietzsche,

the chorus is a living wall against encroaching reality because it … depicts existence more truly, more authentically, more completely than the man of culture who sees himself as the sole reality.61

Prior to the storm scenes, Lear sees himself as the only reality, but the storm shows up his tragic misrecognition. One of the problems we repeatedly come up against when reading King Lear is the confusion between what the storm means for King Lear and

60 Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, p.103. 61 F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, S. Whiteside (trans.), Penguin, London, 2003, p.41. 155 what the storm does in King Lear. To imagine the storm as a choric phenomenon, distinct from the action itself, reestablishes the storm’s own cosmological indifference and at the same time reinforces the distinction between what the storm is in itself and what it means for the king. This was my argument earlier with regard to the storm’s function on a cosmic scale in the seventeenth-century context. Of course, to suggest that

Brook’s storm was designed like a chorus is not to suggest it also directly invoked the same seventeenth-century cosmology, but to say instead that Brook responds to the material presence of the storm and goes some way to constructing a modern equivalent.

3.3. New Cosmic Storms

Many of the world’s most famous auteur theatre makers have taken on the task of staging King Lear. Erika Fischer-Lichte argues that these artists 'have all used Lear in search of proof that their various developed theatre aesthetics are capable of unfolding new aspects or even whole new interpretations of the tragedy.'62 The productions of Lear by Robert Wilson (1985-1990) and Barrie Kosky (1998) are examples of this trend. In this section I show how these very different productions succeed in unfolding new aspects of the tragedy. I also argue that their designs of the storm scenes in particular build upon Brook’s choric storm and reanimate the lost cosmological dimension of the drama in the modern paradigm. These productions were criticised for their free interpretations of the text and their collage-like dramatic settings.

In each case, however, the director does incredibly interesting things with the storm.

Wilson and Kosky can be seen to reanimate the cosmic indifference of the storm.

Neither director staged the storm as a metaphor, but rather as a spectacular audio-visual symphony that awards physical agency to the storm in the drama. They actively worked

62 E. Fischer-Lichte, The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1997, p.201. 156 to demonstrate the storm’s indifference to the human drama and used the opportunity of such a cosmic spectacle to open up other aspects of the play relevant to late twentieth- century audiences.

Both Wilson and Kosky directed productions of the play that departed from their usual approach to theatre making and also from the conventional stage representation of

King Lear. They departed from their normal theatre practice by staging a dramatic work authored by a single playwright. Wilson and Kosky generally constructed theatrical collages based around a particular idea or theme and combined music, myth and drama to create a grand spectacle. For these two directors, staging ‘William Shakespeare’s’

King Lear was something of a departure from their usual theatre making, because they directed an individual play authored by another writer, rather than a self-devised theatrical event.63 Wilson commented on his particular reason for just presenting

‘Shakespeare’s’ Lear:

I don’t have to make theatre with Lear … Shakespeare already made the theatre. What I have to find is a way to put this theatre on a stage with enough room around those words so that people can hear them and think about them. I don’t believe in talking back to a masterpiece. I let it talk to me.64

For Wilson, Lear was a total vision and his job was simply to stage it. But both he and

Kosky, of course, broke from conventional representations of the play by bringing their experimental stagecraft and dramaturgy to their staging of the canonical text. They played with the dramatic text in the same way as they might otherwise play with an idea

63 For reflections on the unconventional theatre practice of Wilson and Kosky see M. Robinson, ‘Robert Wilson, Nicolas Poussin, and Lohengrin’ in E. Fuchs and U. Chaudhuri (eds), Land/Scape/Theater, University of Michigan Press, Michigan, 2002, pp.159-188; E. Sheer, ‘Barrie Kosky’s “The Lost Echo” Awaken the Gods, The Monthly, October, 2006, retrieved from http://www.themonthly.com.au/theatre-edward-scheer-awaken-gods-barrie-kosky-s-lost- echo-295, 29 February 2012; J. McCallum and T. Hillard, ‘Shocking Audiences Modern and Ancient’, Australasian Drama Studies, Vol.56, April, 2010, pp.131-153. 64 Quoted in A. Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson, C. Innes (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p.30. 157 or theme, editing and adding dialogue and song, including music, light, sound and video projection to create a symphonic and ‘cinematic’ world around the text.

Robert Wilson’s production of King Lear began with a workshop version staged in Hollywood in 1985;65 the complete production was slated to premiere in Hamburg in

1987, but did not officially premiere until 1990 in Frankfurt, with the famous German actress Marianne Hoppe in the role of Lear. Writing of the early workshop, before

Hoppe became involved, one reviewer highlighted Wilson’s love of theatrical illusion:

‘Wilson abhors the modern predilection for exposed lighting and technical elements. He is a showman, a stage magician, an illusionist.’66 The idea of Wilson as a master illusionist is an important consideration when it comes to putting a storm on the stage.

Illusion was paramount in the pre-twentieth-century theatre because it demonstrated a certain technical capacity, underpinned by the aesthetic desire to represent a reality as pictorial and dynamic as that in the world itself. In the early twentieth century there was a retreat from illusion for aesthetic, political and practical reasons. While Wilson’s theatrical style was a return to the grand illusionism of the nineteenth century, the director had very different artistic ambitions. His goal was not meteorological verisimilitude, but the creation of an apocalyptic, political and cosmological, as well as meteorological, spectacle.

The storm in the Wilson's Frankfurt production was a pastiche of different storm-related images and effects. Arthur Holmberg explains:

The sources of Wilson’s images are manifold … He liked the way Marianne Hoppe, exhausted, slumped her head over a wall to rest. It became part of King Lear … He saw a tree ripped asunder by a storm in Frankfurt. It became part of King Lear.

65 See D. Sullivan, ‘Stage Review: Wilson and UCLA Cast Probe “Lear”’, Los Angeles Times, 21 May 1985, retrieved from http://articles.latimes.com/1985-05-21/entertainment/ca- 7933_1_king-lear, 12 January 2011. 66 Reference unfortunately mislaid. 158 Wilson was also fond of grand apocalyptic images and according to Holmberg, his interest in the representation of the apocalypse fed into his vision for the storm:

(A) key image in Wilsonland is the apocalypse. Images of catastrophe – natural and manmade – haunt his work like the spectre of Armageddon … In King Lear, the storm became a war of the worlds; suns, moons, and stars crashed into each other, bursting into an intergalactic Fourth of July.

Elsewhere the storm illusion is described as ‘cosmic fireworks … on the blasted heath’.67 Wilson’s stage illusion was similar to de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon – a painting with the added dimension of time – but in this case the painting was a work of many styles, from Romantic to Abstract Expressionist, all combined. Unconstrained by the need to replicate a particular vision of the natural world, Wilson constructed a stormy stage picture where emotions, ideas, politics, history, the cosmos and meteors all collided at once.

This complex image was achieved by means of total control over the staging.

The production took place in Frankfurt's Bockenheim Depot, an enormous arts warehouse space with a stage that had been purpose-built for the production. It had a large carpeted apron, a main playing area in the centre of which a lightning bolt was painted, and a thin rod of light standing downstage centre.68 There was a large cyclorama at the back of the stage, behind which was a mounted rear projector. The cyclorama was animated with film images of the storm during the scenes. According to one critic, ‘The sense of depth that light creates behind the translucent rear projector …

[gave] the illusion of infinite space’.69

Wilson created a cosmos around the Lear story by adding other elements that enabled particular themes to be both highlighted and given a political significance. The

67 Ibid., pp.86,117-118,124. 68 Fischer-Lichte, ‘Passage to the realm of shadows: Robert Wilson’s King Lear in Frankfurt’, p.202. 69 Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson, p.124. 159 play began with Hoppe reciting the words of William Carlos William’s ‘The Last

Words of My English Grandmother’, a poem that tells the story of a grandmother's final trip in an ambulance. She has no wish to be in the ambulance, but neither does she want to be part of the world any longer.70 She is not unlike Lear: Lear is dying but does not want to, but also wants no responsibilities in the world either. By casting a female in the role of Lear, Wilson universalised the experience of a character’s isolated ‘crawl toward death’ in the play.71 But also, by casting a female in this role, he complicated the way the audience identified with the dramatic narrative, by referencing feminist performance of the 1960s and ‘70s, and foregrounding the gender politics of the play, the father- daughter relationships and the questions of blame and responsibility. Thus, at the same time as universalising the experience of dying, the act of cross casting also locates the production in its particular historical moment.

Wilson’s decision to cast Hoppe had interesting implications for the storm scenes. The spectacle of a female Lear amidst images of the apocalypse and storms, half fireworks and half meteors, attempted to bridge a gap between a drama about an individual’s psychological struggle with their own unique biological situation and a drama about the legitimacy of hegemonic social, political and historical order. The 80- year-old woman stood on a cavernous stage, exposed to thunder and lightning that might have been meteorological or might have been man-made. Thus, what Wilson’s stagecraft and dramaturgy achieved in the storm was the creation of an event somewhat independent of the story itself, an event with its own physical presence and agency, and

70 ‘Oh, oh, oh! she cried / as the ambulance men lifted / her to the stretcher – / Is this what you call // making me comfortable? / By now her mind was clear / Oh you think you’re smart / you young people // she said, but I’ll tell you / you don’t know anything … What are those / fuzzy- looking things out there? / Trees? Well I’m tired / of them and rolled her head away.’ W.C. Williams, William Carlos Williams: Selected Poems, C. Tomlinson (ed.), Penguin, London, 1972, p.127. 71 On female Lears, see L. Senelick, ‘Butch up your Shakespeare’ in The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre, Routledge, London and New York, 2000, pp.487-488. 160 one that was indifferent to the rest of the dramatic action. But, at the same time, Wilson did not nostalgically reference the classical cosmology underpinning Shakespeare’s play; instead he built a contemporary, image-filled cosmos around the drama that seemed infinite and chaotic. Within this the storm thundered in a new cosmos; his three- dimensional theatrical collage of images included the very physical destructiveness of the meteors themselves.

Almost a decade later Barrie Kosky directed a no less radical interpretation of the play at the Sydney Opera House, with arguably Australia’s leading Shakespearean actor John Bell in the title role.72 This production divided both critics and audiences, who saw it as either a masterpiece or a complete failure. One critic reported that: ‘I heard some people walk out at the interval … older people … saying “I think this is just incredibly self-indulgent”. And I think some young people might love it and others might think, “I don’t have a clue what’s going on”.’73 Partly responsible for the confusion was Kosky’s heavy editing of the text, including the storm scenes. Act 3.1 was cut in its entirety and all that remained of Act 3.2, every other character removed, was Lear’s three main speeches, ‘Blow winds’, ‘Rumble thy bellyful’ and ‘Poor Naked

Wretches’. Bell played the storm scene on the proscenium, in front of a ballooned red crushed-velvet curtain, his face picked out in a tight spotlight. As in Granville-Barker’s production, the speeches in the storm were staged to emphasise Lear’s psychological state. But following the main speeches the curtains opened, and, as strobe lights flashed,

Lear darted madly around the stage. Lear’s knights were dressed in black and white polka dot pants, with oversized prosthetic phalluses hanging outside of their trousers;

72 Kosky told the Sydney Morning Herald at the time: ‘Stylistically the production combines the aesthetics of the evil empire in Star Wars with a dash of Nazism and the eerie poetic of William Blake.’ Retrieved from http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/theatre/brush-up-your- shakespeare-20111020-1m9sp.html, 29 February 2012. 73 K. Herbert, ‘Review’, Herald-Sun retrieved from ‘Where there’s a Will’, http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/stories/s12376.htm, 11 March 2011. 161 during the storm they also wore enormous headpieces shaped like the heads of animals and various non-human monsters. Although the dialogue was cut back, the storm scenes continued with this surreal image on stage, flashes of light and sounds of thunder and music contributing to the spectacularisation of unconscious madness, desire and cosmological chaos.74

Like Wilson’s, Barrie Kosky’s Lear took the occasion of the storm to explore other ideas represented in the dramatic poetry. In lieu of a literal interpretation of Lear's journey over the storm-blasted landscape to the hovel, he focused on constructing a dream-like spectacle, which might have been read as a theatricalisation of Lear's unconscious during the storm, or else perhaps a representation of the emotional confrontation of cosmological indifference. In a program note, however, Kosky implies that he was interested not only in unconscious desires and psychology of the eponymous character, but also in the cosmological history of the scenes. He cites John

Donne’s ‘First Anniversary’, a famous exploration of the philosophy of the new age and how it challenged the classical paradigm:

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, The Element of fire is quite put out; The Sunne is lost, and th'earth, and no mans wit Can well direct him where to looke for it.75

In short, Kosky’s production sought to explore the relationship between man and the cosmos in a contemporary context. His exploration was enabled by experimentation with the dramatic form: he heavily cut the dramatic poetry, had wild light and sound, non-representational sets, incoherent costumes and an entourage of odd animal-like

74 There is a rare account of Kosky’s Lear in Richard Madelaine, ‘As unstable as the King but never daft (?): Text and variant readings of King Lear’, Sydney Studies in English, Vol.28, 2002, retrieved from http://escholarship.usyd.edu.au/journals/index.php/SSE/article/view/562, 3 October 2011. A grainy in-house video recording is available for research-purpose viewing from the Bell Shakespeare Archives. See http://archives.bellshakespeare.com.au accessed 10 April 2011. 75 Retrieved from http://archives.bellshakespeare.com.au, 2 April 2011. 162 figures for Lear. The spectacular strobe-lit imagery, suggestive of more than the meteorological and psychological, created an entire cosmos on the stage. This particular representation of the storm gives the indifferent cosmos a role in the drama. It takes control of the Lear world out of Lear's hands, and returns it to some other realm of nature, politics, unconsciousness and biology: a cosmic framework of a more modern kind, a cosmos with agency beyond the human, but not necessarily in the realm of the divine either.

The productions of both Wilson and Kosky were no less heavily criticised by the actors involved in the productions than by the reviewers. For example, Marianne Hoppe did not subscribe to Wilson's vision, and was very vocal about it:

This Wilson can’t fool me. I started out at the Deutsches Theatre with Max Rheinhardt [sic]. I know what a director is. Wilson is not a director. He’s a lighting designer. A Wilson actor runs here or there only because there’s a change in the lights. On a Wilson stage, light pushes the actors around. Light is important, but in Shakespeare, language is also important. I can speak the lines the way he wants, but I don’t believe Shakespeare wrote the part of Lear to be recited by an autistic child.76

Hoppe's criticism was similar to that levelled by Gielgud at the Devine-Noguchi Lear.

Her criticism was also similar to that of John Bell, who was not surprised that the

Kosky Lear received ‘bags of hate mail’, and who felt it necessary to look over Kosky's shoulder to make sure he did not 'misinterpret the meaning of an entire speech'.77 But from another point of view, this tension between actor and director, or between audience and production, cuts to the heart of the play’s central dilemma, namely the tension between how Lear wants the cosmos to be and what the cosmos actually is.

These actors and audiences all had expectations for the Lear story, but those expectations were not met; instead a wild spectacle, both indifferent to their desires and

76 Quoted in Holberg, pp.137-38 77 See J. Bell, John Bell: The Time of my Life, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2003, p.263. 163 to the specific temporal limitations and geographical specifications of Shakespeare’s text, ensued. In this respect, the radical visions made real in these productions could arguably be viewed as more authentic than the mainstream twentieth-century representations of the play, simply because they do not reduce the storm to a psychological metaphor. They aim instead to express the complexity of the Lear cosmos, its social, political, scientific and meteorological dimensions, and represent

Lear, as well as the actor playing him, and the audience-member watching, as dwarfed by this wild cosmological power. The vitriolic reaction to the play serves to reemphasise the radical cosmology expressed by the storm’s indifference: the reviewers would have preferred the Lear cosmos to reflect their understanding of the play, but instead directors like Wilson and Kosky are operating as ‘wanton gods’ playing with actors and audiences for their sport, and leaving them baffled and asking, like Lear,

‘What is the cause of thunder?’ or ‘What is the purpose of this spectacle?’.

But although these productions might theatricalise the indifferent King Lear cosmos and reanimate the storm in a way that proves theoretically interesting to a contemporary audience, ultimately that audience’s desire for a dramatic narrative must be acknowledged and given satisfaction. With the storm’s indifference reanimated and a modern cosmos reimagined, I argue in the next, and final, section of the chapter, that early twenty-first-century auteur directors inherit the aesthetic sensibilities of directors like Wilson and Kosky. But they treat the play texts with scholarly care and maintain the story, while incorporating the indifferent cosmos into their productions as well.

3.4. Making Sense of the Storm in an Infinite Cosmos

This overview of the stage history of King Lear began in London in 1606 and travelled through time and around the world. It has demonstrated how the specific

164 design of the storm played a key role in the theatrical reimagining of the play for successive generations. So it will not be seen as inappropriate to conclude by looking at two of Lear’s most recent productions: one by the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by Englishman David Farr, at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon

(2010) and the Roundhouse in London (2011), and the other, Lér Konungur, by the

National Theatre of Iceland, directed by the Australian Benedict Andrews, in Reykjavik

(2010-2011).78 Both Farr’s and Andrews's aesthetic visions carry with them a sense of the historical importance of the play while at the same time looking to make the play contemporary: they reference the meteorological spectacle of the pre-twentieth-century stage, the stark austerity of the twentieth century and the visual complexity of later auteur directors such as Wilson and Kosky. But neither director sacrifices the narrative logic of Shakespeare's dramatic action in order to achieve their theatrical goals.

With Greg Hicks in the title role, David Farr’s production (which I was fortunate enough to see) charted a fine line between traditional Shakespearean character acting and physical experimentation.79 The production was not located in a particular historical period. It was initially set in a factory, which served as an industrial age castle. The characters were clothed in large fur coats, suits, crowns with chunky jewels and long gowns, but by the time the storm broke many of the characters were wearing modern military uniforms and the factory seemed no longer to be iron clad, but rather made of flimsy plywood – which the Fool was literally able to kick down! While the design

78 Andrews’ production opened in 2010 on 26 December, the day on which the very first Lear of which we have any record was staged in 1606. 79 For reviews of the production, see M. Billington, ‘King Lear’, retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/mar/03/review-king-lear-courtyard-stratford-michael- billington, 12 September 2011; C. Spenser, ‘The RSC’s King Lear at the Courtyard Theatre, review’, retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre- reviews/7361465/The-RSCs-King-Lear-at-the-Courtyard-Theatre-review.html, 12 September 2011. 165 moved through historical time in the background, the drama itself, rooted in conventional contemporary character acting, played coherently in the foreground.

Illus. 20: Greg Hicks as King Lear.

Embracing the large-scale spectacle of Wilson and Kosky, for his storm scenes

Farr brought together elements of abstraction and meteorological realism. A complex system of pumps, tanks and drains enabled real water to fall as rain on the stage – not the entire stage, however, simply upon Lear who stood upon a small podium centre stage (Illus. 20). The thunder was made up of scratchy metallic and sound effects, evoking both the violence of nature and the mechanical world. The lightning consisted in flashes of both strobe and fluorescent lights, which represented both the meteorological lightning, and also failing electrical wiring in a doomed kingdom.80 This staged storm represented the agency of the thunder, lightning, wind and rain on the one hand, but also aimed to entangle the natural world with the built environment on the other.

80 In a private conversation with him on 26 August 2010, Greg Hicks (Lear) explained to me the advantages of being on a podium and set apart from everyone else at that point: feeling real water on his face enhanced his capacity to understand the emotions behind Lear’s lines. 166 Benedict Andrews’s Lér Konungur combined bold character acting, spectacular meteorological realism with a stark contemporary design.81 Like Farr, Andrews played with the possibilities of multiple aesthetic styles. He used not only contemporary urban realism, real elements like water and electricity, but also abstraction to access the various dimensions of the text. He stripped his stage back to its walls and painted them black, and dressed the characters in conservative contemporary business clothes. Rather than designing every aspect of the Lear world in a photorealistic manner, design was used to highlight aspects of key scenes and draw out the themes. For the division of the kingdom, the stage was cleared of any permanent structures and filled with hundreds of helium balloons, reminiscent of an American political convention.82 The scenes following the storm, in the hovel and Cornwall's castle, were played in white rooms that looked like the wings of a demountable office space or kit home, with the real storm water continuing to fall outside. Whereas Farr situated King Lear across time, Andrews located it in the present day, a present envisioned as a neo-liberal capitalist and corporate kingdom.

81 This production is described by E. Blake, ‘Praise Rains Down on Lear’, Sydney Morning Herald, retrieved from http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/theatre/praise-rains-down-on- lear-20110104-19f5m.html, 12 February 2011; B. Andrews, ‘Benedict Andrews’, retrieved from http://benedict andrews.com, 12 February 2011; ‘Lér Konungur’, retrieved from http://www.leikhusid.is/Syningar/Leikarid-2010-2011/syning/1071/Ler-konungur, 12 February 2011. 82 See the notebook images on Andrews’s website, retrieved from http://www.benedictandrews.com, 12 February 2011. 167

Illus. 21: Arnar Jónsson as King Lear.

The storm scenes of Andrews’s production were technologically very sophisticated: the actors were drenched in nine tonnes of water that fell, like heavy rain, for 30-35 minutes.83 As Illustration 21 shows, the stage was lit to highlight the rain and the characters, and left bare, except for fragments of burst balloons used in as set dressing in the division-of-the-kingdom scene. While the empty stage served to lay emphasis on Lear’s psychological dilemma, the sheer force and relentlessness of nine tonnes of water meant that the actors, like their characters, were obliged to endure the storm.84

Although these two productions create a contemporary social, political, historical and natural cosmos around their dramatization of Shakespeare’s King Lear

83 In private correspondence with me (as well as on his website), Andrews has confirmed the duration of his storm. 84 Andrews is known for direction that sets up an endurance task for the actor. An eight-hour two-part spectacular for the Sydney Theatre Company, his The War of the Roses (2008) included adaptations of Shakespeare’s Richard II and Richard III, alongside Henry V and Henry VI. For the duration of Richard II and Henry VI showers of gold confetti and ash were made to fall on the stage. See R. Higson, ‘With Cate Blanchett, all that glitters may really be gold’, retrieved from http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/with-blanchett-all-may-be-gold/story- e6frg6o6-1111118546278, 11 March 2011. 168 and as such reanimate the storm’s agency in the drama, such an interpretation is not commonplace. Indeed, arguably the influence of productions from the mid-twentieth century, in which austerity and psychological metaphors drove the design, continues to be the order of the day. The Bell Shakespeare Company production, directed by Marion

Potts and starring John Bell, at the Sydney Opera House in 201085 and the Royal

National Theatre production at London’s Donmar Warehouse (2010-2011) directed by

Michael Grandage and starring Derek Jacobi,86 were both minimalist in terms of design.

Both were reminiscent of a much earlier trend towards a quasi-Beckettian austerity: empty stages, with entirely grey walls, on which simple percussive music, or else sound and lighting, created the storm. The Lears of Potts's and Grandage's productions were

Illus. 22: Sir Derek Jacobi as King Lear. given almost free rein to explore Lear's psychological complexity, neither actor having to 'contend with the fretful elements', their speeches reflecting upon their own internal complexity and simply punctuated by the thunder. Indeed, the sound effects were so quiet in Grandage’s production that Jacobi could whisper the speeches in the storm; a crown of weeds that looked more like a crown of thorns gave him an ultimately

85 See http://www.bellshakespeare.com.au/whatson/past/2010/kinglear, 29 February 2012. 86 See http://www.donmarwarehouse.com/pl114review.html, 29 February 2012. 169 redemptive and Christ-like image. If anything, this staging emphasised the storm only as an extension of Lear’s psychological situation. It seems that despite the more radical reinterpretations of the King Lear that I have covered in this chapter, the interpretation that still dominates our popular understanding of the is that of a solipsistic King Lear, wrestling with his troubled and stormy mind. The Grandage production was critically acclaimed: ‘It is a tremendous Lear, to be ranked with those of Paul Scofield and John

Wood.’ 87 Furthermore, this production was filmed as part of the National Theatre Live program and, on 3 February 2011, was broadcast around the world – to a combined audience of over 50,000 people – before playing a 5-week season at the Brooklyn

Academy of Music.88 The storm as a metaphor for Lear's psychological isolation and madness still holds great sway.

What the productions of Farr and Andrews sought to animate, transcending the austerity of those of Potts and Grandage, was the force of the storm itself. These two productions signalled a return to a more serious consideration of the storm’s material function in the drama – not simply by means of the technology producing real rain on stage, but in the way that rain intersected not only with the emotions of Lear or the dirt of the heath, but also with the infrastructure of the kingdom (in Farr) and the bodies of other characters (Andrews). Despite the fact that, in a modern paradigm, the meteors have come to symbolise aspects of the human condition rather than hold any meaning in themselves, in these productions the way in which the storms were staged changed that by making the actors physically confront the cataclysm. The move to reanimate the meteors themselves involved the storm itself in the drama about king, kingdom and cosmos. When the cosmos was a closed, geocentric sphere, the meteors were thought to

87 See M. Billington, ‘King Lear, Donmar Warehouse’, retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/dec/08/review-king-lear-derek-jacobi?INTCMP=SRCH, 29 February 2012. 88 For further details, see http://www.donmarwarehouse.com/pl114review.html, 29 February 2012. 170 be directly involved in social, political and religious issues because of the perceived correspondence between the heavens and the earth. In the modern infinite cosmos, no such physical correspondence exists but that does not mean the meteors no longer have the power to shape human affairs as they have been since the dawn of time. In my view,

Farr’s and Andrews’s productions capture some of the historical and political aspects of a meteorological event and, as such, stage the storms in a material, active and meaningful relationship with the human story.

3.5. Conclusion

This chapter has discussed the evolution of the storm in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the first half of the century artists tended away from the representation of the meteors in search of other, seemingly more meaningful, ways of representing the storm. Max Reinhardt, Harley Granville-Barker and George Devine all attempted to endow the meteors with psychological or purely symbolic meaning. They rejected the tradition of pure pictorial representation of the weather and pursued an avowedly theatrical representation of intangible or philosophical aspects of the human condition. Granville-Barker’s was the most culturally and critically influential of these productions. He tested onstage his notion that the storm is only significant in relation to

Lear and that it has no wider effect on the drama. This interpretation came to dominate our modern understanding of the relationship between Lear and the storm and it is an interpretation that is still pervasive today. But in this thesis I am working against this interpretation of the storm and in this section I revealed it to be the product of a particular historical moment.

171 In the second half of the century practitioners searched for new ways to represent the storm that emphasise its broader social or political function rather than its intimate connection simply to Lear. But due to the changed conventions for meteorological representation and, indeed, the changed worldview – decentred man in an infinite cosmos – this experimental creative process did not really translate to an audience. Peter Brook directed the most influential production of this period, one in which the storm was put into a dialogue with Lear. I set myself apart from general critical opinion and argued that Brook saw the storm as a chorus to the stubborn Lear, refusing to correspond with Lear’s cries. Even later in the century, as auteur theatre directors experimented wildly with the storm scenes, Wilson and Kosky attempted to reanimate the historical and cosmic force of the storm. These two directors were heavily criticised for their spectacular stormy experiments. While audiences and critics rejected these experiments and refused to acknowledge that the storm might have any agency, I argued that these productions, and more recent attempts by David Farr in England and

Benedict Andrews in Iceland, gave the storm an agency beyond its impact upon the old king and provided it with a clear and independent function in the drama. Despite recent experimentation, the dominant tendency to associate the storm exclusively with Lear’s mind continues to dominate in both theatrical productions and scholarly accounts of the play. To this end, although the storms of the later part of the century operate to complicate our understanding of the storm, theatrical tradition has not succeeded in revitalising the full meteorological significance of the storm. So, in the second part of the thesis I seek to reassess the storm in King Lear itself and explore the full extent of its involvement in the human drama, with a view to critically reanimating this lost meteorological force at the heart of the play.

172

Part 2: A New Interpretation of the Storm

173 Chapter 4

Rethinking Lear in the Storm: Shame, Mortality, and the King’s ‘Body Natural’

The second part of this thesis moves away from analysing the ways in which others have represented the storm on stage or considered it in criticism and presents a new literary analysis of the play, taking into account the storm as a meteorological event. In both Chapters Four and Five the force and agency of the storm is brought to bear upon a close reading of the written play. Given that there is a long-standing critical tradition based on reading the play using the storm as a metaphor, there may be many other ways of reading the play when the storm is interpreted as a meteorological event.

This chapter focuses on just one of those possibilities. It treats Lear’s unique emotional and physical journey in relation to the storm as a vital dimension of a tragedy about an old and dying king. This chapter theorises the meaning of the old King’s relationship with the meteorological cataclysm, using theories of shame and Ernst B. Kantorowicz’s understanding of the Renaissance idea of the ‘King’s two bodies’. The argument is that

Lear goes through an emotional transformation in the face of the eyeless and pitiless storm that ultimately relieves him from the shameful kingly obligation to hide his weak and mortal body.

4.1. ‘Off, off, you lendings’

Moments after contemplating Poor Tom’s almost naked body and suggesting to the Bedlam beggar that he would be better off dead than exposed to the storm, Lear decides that he would prefer to be naked and exposed too. He cries ‘Off, off, you lendings’ (3.4.107) and heroically tears at his clothes. But although Lear desires to be naked, the playtext does not prescribe how many robes he disposes of and, as such, rarely is Lear allowed to strip entirely naked in stage productions of King Lear. The

174 Fool and Kent usually restrain him before he gets too far. Indeed, so rarely is Lear allowed to fully strip naked that when Sir Ian McKellen bared his genitals for London audiences in 2008, he ignited a theatrical scandal. The size of his penis, rather than the meaning of his nakedness, became the focal point of many of the reviews.1 In the theatre, the degree of Lear’s exposure to the storm and, by extension, the audience’s exposure to Lear’s nakedness, is decided by the director or actor-manager. When reflecting on theatre history we are compelled to consider the meaning of these theatrical decisions. But when reading we can think more like a director than a critic, and focus upon the potential meanings of the dramatic text that are not necessarily emphasised in theatrical production.

Contemplating the potential meanings of the text is precisely what Charles

Lamb did back in 1810 when he considered the possibility of restoring Shakespeare’s

King Lear to the stage. Indeed, he concluded that King Lear was unfit for theatrical representation because of the wretched spectacle of Lear in the storm. He decided he would prefer to only read Shakespeare’s tragedy, thereby avoiding the sight of Lear’s vile old body on the stage:

The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passions are terrible as a volcano; they are storms turning up and disclosing the bottom of the sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare ... On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear but we are Lear – we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms.2

Although Lamb identifies that there is something weak and infirm about Lear, when reading the play he forgets about the storm’s fury, glorifies Lear’s internal complexity,

1 See C. Davies ‘Sir Ian takes on the nakedness of King Lear’, retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1547193/Sir-Ian-takes-on-the-nakedness-of-King- Lear.html, 6 September, 2011. 2 C. Lamb, ‘On the tragedies of Shakespeare: Considered With Reference To Their Fitness For Stage Representation’, (orig. publ. 1810), in J.M. Brown (ed.), The Portable Charles Lamb, Penguin Books, London, 1980, p.574. 175 and altogether ignore the complexities of his physical situation. That Lear is old and dying is something Lamb would prefer not to think about.

This chapter engages in a close reading of the play for precisely the opposite reason to Lamb. The chapter works to confront the physical infirmity and weakness of

Lear in the storm. On the stage we are confronted by Lear’s body and exposed to his corporal infirmities to some extent. Greg Hicks in the 2010 RSC production looked pale and weak (Illus. 23), for example, but the full extent of his bodily struggle could not be represented. This is partly because Hicks’s body is lean and pale, but not fragile and frail. Despite the intensity of his performance and the pallor created by his makeup,

Hicks’ muscular form did not present an octogenarian Lear struggling with a failing body. Indeed, the extent of Lear’s corporal infirmity is difficult to represent in the theatre because, as the scandal over McKellen’s genitals demonstrates, in certain cultural contexts the theatricalisation of Lear’s nakedness and weakness often undermines the deeper meaning of his struggle. By contrast this chapter interrogates the meanings of Lear’s corporal infirmity, weakness and nakedness in the storm, and reflects upon their significance within the dramatic text.

The reason for this tragedy is that Lear is old and dying. Unlike Shakespeare’s other tragic heroes who all fall off their perch for one reason or another, it is a miracle that Lear is still even on top of his. He admits as much in 1.1 when he divides his kingdom and relinquishes power in order to ‘Unburdened crawl toward death’ (1.1.40).

While Lear has a transformative emotional experience in the storm, the same storm envelops his body. By the time the storm passes, Lear is irreversibly altered and the kingdom is at war. The storm has an important physical role in this dynamic dramatic sequence. The task of this chapter is to assess the significance of Lear’s encounter with the material storm, and to draw out its meaning for Lear who at once knows he is old

176 and soon will die but refuses to let go of ‘The name, and all the th’addition to a king’

(1.1.137).

In order to emphasise the complexity of the storm sequence and to animate a couple of moments within it that are crucial to my interpretation of Lear’s encounter, the first section of this chapter provides a brief plot summary. The second section frames Lear’s emotional struggle as one born of shame, then defines shame as a social emotion and explores Lear’s struggle with shame. Here I argue that Lear is ashamed of his mortality and that he tries to hide the shameful part of himself – his weak and animal body – in order to avoid confronting the physical weakness and political powerlessness such mortality brings upon a king. This unwillingness to confront mortality is arguably quite normal. However, I argue that Lear’s shame is a significant problem and one precipitated by the Renaissance notion of the ‘King’s two bodies’. As such, by investigating Lear as an ashamed character – as opposed to a mad one – his relationship with the storm takes on new significance. In the third section I explore the nature of Lear’s struggle with shame through to his shameless self-revelation in the storm where he exposes his mortal body to the ‘extremity of the skies’ (3.4.101) and begins to imagine a kingdom that allows a king to live like a mortal. This is a tragic impossibility, both for Lear and for the kingdom, and he dies soon after his revelation.

However, in this section the significance of Lear’s material encounter with the storm is fully revealed.

In the final section, the other characters’ perspectives on Lear’s journey are highlighted as a counterpoint to illustrate that no one but Lear understands his transformation. Lear is isolated in his emotional transformation in the storm and everyone else thinks he is mad. I illustrate this disjunction here both to further elucidate the powerful impact of shame upon Lear’s journey and to foreshadow an important

177 aspect of Chapter Five. The purpose of Chapter Five is to analyse the storm’s material role in the political disaster and map the transformation it precipitates in the kingdom.

The conflict between how Lear understands himself and how all the other characters view his situation has an important bearing on my analysis of the storm’s physical role in the disaster that unfolds in the kingdom in the final chapter. Contrary to Lamb and most other critics, this chapter elucidates the meaning of Lear’s embodied experience with the material and indifferent storm and assesses how the storm itself changes the eponymous character’s understanding of himself and his place in the world.

4.2. What Happens During the Storm?

The storm scenes are complex and it is easy to overlook the details of precisely what happens during the long sequence. The storm begins with the direction Storm and

Tempest. It occurs in 2.2 when Lear refuses to relinquish his entourage in exchange for a lodging and refuses to weep at the fact that his daughters have issued him with an ultimatum:

You think I’ll weep, No, I’ll not weep. [Storm and Tempest] I have full cause for weeping, but this heart Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws Or e’er I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad (2.2.474-478).

Instead of weeping, Lear opts to go out in the storm. The Fool goes with him. Lear’s decision to go out in the storm is a refusal to capitulate to his daughters’ demands. He would rather his heart literally break before he compromises. In other words, for Lear, going out into the storm is a refusal to give in or give up. Precisely what it is he refuses to give up I will explore below. The point here is that regardless of Goneril, Regan and

Cornwall’s machinations, Lear chooses to hold his ground and to go out into a storm rather than relinquish his entourage.

178 All the other characters onstage – Regan, Cornwall and Goneril – retreat indoors, because ‘'tis a wild night’ (2.2.501). Even Gloucester stays inside, although he ponders whether or not to go out and help his master. The storm is already shaping the action: it divides the characters between those who can remain inside and sheltered and those who have to go out into the storm. It unequivocally reveals who holds power and who does not. Lear, having retained ‘The name, and all th’addition to a king’ (1.1.137), but having also relinquished the ‘sway, revenue and execution’ (1.1.137-138) of the kingdom in the first scene, is finally forced to confront the reality of that unconventional division of powers. Conversely, confident and comfortable in their position, Goneril, Regan and Cornwall retreat indoors. Gloucester is literally caught between indoors and outdoors. Staying indoors represents the necessity of his loyalty to those who hold power in the new kingdom, but going outdoors represents his real loyalty to the old and now powerless king. The storm forces an unequivocal display of these loyalties, because of the urgency of the basic need to take shelter from such wild weather.

In act three, the storm divides the characters and dominates the plot. In 3.1 under the direction Storm still, a Knight and Kent are out in the storm and report what is happening offstage, or in other parts of the kingdom that are also affected by the storm.

Lear has run off and is ‘Contending with the fretful elements’ (3.1.4), there are growing tensions ‘'twixt Albany and Cornwall’ (3.1.21) and French spies are aware of the situation in the state. Kent requests that Cordelia be informed of what is happening so he can come to the king’s aid, but first they need to find the king. They both exit the stage in search of Lear. In 3.2, also under the direction Storm still, Lear is represented out in the storm and literally contending with the fretful elements. Lear has an extensive dialogue with the storm and he tries to understand his position in relation to it. He first

179 mimics the power of a king who has control of the storm. It does not respond. He then tries to persuade the storm to agree with him, and then curses the storm for siding with his daughters. Again, the storm does not respond. Below I explore the details of Lear’s experience. Although Lear seems to want to stay out in the storm, the entire time the

Fool and then Kent try to convince Lear to go inside and take shelter. For example, the

Fool says ‘Good nuncle, in, and ask thy daughters blessing’ (3.2.13) and Kent also suggests ‘Hard by here is a hovel: Some friendship it will lend you 'gainst this tempest’

(3.2.61-62). Lear ignores them until he is ready to move on, and then asks the Fool to take him to the hovel. The sub-plot develops in 3.3, when Gloucester decides to go out into the storm to find Lear (‘The King my old master must be / relieved’ [3.3.18-19]) and Edmund reveals that he will report Gloucester’s treachery to Cornwall.

In 3.4, the Storm still looms over the action. Lear is beside the hovel but directly refuses to go inside five times and blankly ignores several more suggestions to take shelter from Kent, the Fool and Gloucester. He contemplates the nature of his existence through a prayer to the ‘Poor naked wretches’ (3.4.28) and then encounters Poor Tom, an exemplary naked wretch. Lear reflects upon the nature of ‘Unaccommodated man’

(3.4.106) and subsequently strips naked to be more like Poor Tom. Old, dying and now naked and exposed to the storm in the middle of the night, Lear still refuses to enter the hovel. ‘First let me talk with this philosopher’ (3.4.150), he demands, and then he asks

Poor Tom, ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ (3.4.151). I argued in Chapter One that this question should be read in the Aristotelian sense, ‘what is the final cause or purpose of this storm?’ This question is not directly answered in the play. Chapters Two and Three showed ways in which the storm is given a purpose in theatrical productions by means of its physical realisation on stage. In some ways any interpretation of the play, be it theatrical or critical, makes a claim as to the purpose of the storm. But in this chapter I

180 argue that one of the purposes of the storm – the material, meteorological storm – is to facilitate Lear’s emotional transformation. Although an answer to the question is not audible, I will show below that an answer is manifest in Lear’s words and actions. As such, by the end of 3.4, Lear has found his answer and retreats into the hovel with

Gloucester, Kent, the Fool and Poor Tom. This entry into the hovel signals the end of the scenes actually played out in the storm.

Even though the action moves indoors, the storm still directly affects the characters’ actions until the end of the act. In 3.5, Cornwall orders Edmund to arraign

Gloucester for helping the King while he is out in the storm. In 3.6 Lear, Kent, the Fool and Poor Tom are sheltering in the hovel, because, as Gloucester declares at the outset of the scene, ‘Here is better than the open air’ (3.6.1). In this scene King Lear sets up a mock trial and plays at prosecuting his daughters for what they did to him. In 3.7, quite the opposite happens; Cornwall and Regan arraign Gloucester for helping the king: they pull out his eyes for trying to shelter Lear from the storm. Although the characters are sheltering from the storm by 3.6, 3.7 is important to consider within the storm sequence simply because it is the first time we start to see the violent impact of the action that has unfolded during the storm in the previous seven scenes – action that will escalate to civil war in the next act. The fallout of the storm sequence will be explored in detail in the next chapter where I discuss the storm as a disaster.

This exegesis of the plot during the storm shows how Lear exercises agency by refusing to dismiss his train in exchange for shelter. He ends up exposed to the storm, reflecting upon his exposure and desiring to understand what it all means. In what follows, I analyse Lear’s exposure to the storm, treating the meteorological event not as a symbol of madness or chaos, but as a material force that Lear reckons with and

181 through which he comes to a new understanding of himself and his place in the world.

4.3. Lear’s Shame

It is often taken for granted that Lear is mad and that the madness relates to the storm.3 However, it is rare that the specific nature of the correspondence is itself interrogated. What is clear is that Lear is not of sound mind and he is, at the very least, quite troubled from the outset of the play. Indeed, Lear himself is worried he is going mad on several occasions: ‘O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! I / would not be mad. / Keep me in temper, I would not be mad’ (1.5.42-45), ‘O Fool, I shall go mad!’ (2.2.477) and ‘O, that way madness lies, let me shun that; / No more of that’

(3.4.21-22). But what is the nature of this so-called madness? Here I contend that Lear is not mad in any modern or pathological sense, but rather he is maddened by shame.

It is worth noting that I am the not only scholar to locate shame as the emotional epicentre of the conflict in King Lear and the main emotional state of the eponymous character. According to several critics, shame, especially Lear’s shame, instigates and sustains the dramatic conflict of King Lear. William Zak’s Sovereign Shame: A Study of

King Lear (1984) is a book-length investigation of how shame is generative of the conflict within the play. Ewan Fernie’s Shame in Shakespeare (2002) is the most extensive study of the thematic and dramatic function of shame across Shakespeare’s entire body of work. Fernie claims that shame is a ‘constant preoccupation, even obsession, in the work of William Shakespeare’.4 Even though shame is integral to most of Shakespeare’s plays, Fernie claims that King Lear is the play in which

3 See for example J. Waters Bennett, ‘The Storm Within: the Madness of King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol.13, No.2, 1962, pp.137-155. 4 E. Fernie, Shame in Shakespeare, Routledge, London and New York, 2002, p.1. 182 ‘Shakespeare’s vision of shame is most lucidly and completely revealed … (and) is

Shakespeare’s most insistently significant play of shame’.5 In ‘The Avoidance of Love’

Stanley Cavell claims: ‘in King Lear shame comes first, and brings rage and folly in its train.’6 Although these scholars agree that shame is Lear’s central emotion, and even though many of them see some of Lear’s most ashamed and shameful behaviour as occurring during the storm sequence, no one has yet linked Lear’s struggle with shame in any comprehensive manner to the storm itself. Thus I will show how a king stripping naked in a storm is exemplary shameful behaviour. Furthermore, I argue that Lear is provoked to shamefully reveal himself because of his journey through and dialogue with the storm. Before undertaking this analysis, it is necessary to outline what shame is, how we can read Lear as an ashamed character, and what Lear is ashamed of.

Shame is a painful feeling of embarrassment or distress we feel about ourselves, in the presence of others. For example, imagine you are an adolescent and your mother catches you doing something you should not, like shoplifting, masturbating or reading her diary. You may have been deriving some pleasure from the act of deviance and you know you should not have been doing it, but you feel shame – disgust, humiliation and embarrassment – after you are caught. In that moment, shame is, on the one hand, a deeply personal, painful and isolating feeling of humiliation. On the other, it is a social and, arguably, political emotion brought about by the presence of another person – in the case of this example, your mother. Shame is inextricably linked to one’s place within a society or community. Further, by virtue of the emotion's capacity to regulate behaviour, shame creates a boundary between how one wants to behave and how one should or should not behave within a community. Although you really wanted to steal

5 Ibid., pp.173-4. 6 S. Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love’, Must We Mean What We Say?, (orig. publ. 1969), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, (pp.267-353) p.287. 183 the t-shirt, touch yourself or read the diary, you know this is socially unacceptable behaviour.

Due to the multi-faceted nature of shame – it’s psychological, sociological and, arguably, ideological dimensions – it is easy to get lost in definitional work.7 It is a historically rich8 and culturally dynamic9 emotion. The dimension of shame that I utilise in my analysis of Lear’s situation is the relational structure of shame. Shame is an emotion that defines humans as both individual and social animals: we are animals with personal desires that are regulated by morals, values and laws. As such, to explore a shame response is to take account of the individual’s place within a broader social or cultural context.

Twentieth-century affect theorist Silvan Tomkins offers a good example of the dual nature of shame. He initially defines shame as a distinctively personal emotion: ‘in

7 Contemporary psychologist Paul Gilbert provides a good description of the various dimensions of shame. According to Gilbert, shame can ‘be explained in terms of emotion (e.g., as a primary affect in its own right, as an auxiliary emotion, or as a composite of other emotions such as fear, anger or self-disgust); cognitions and beliefs about the self (e.g., that one is and/or is seen by others to be inferior, flawed, inadequate, etc); behaviours and actions (e.g., such as running away, hiding and concealing, or attacking others to cover one’s shame); evolved mechanisms (e.g., the expression of shame seems to use similar biobehavioural systems to those of animals expressing submissive behaviour); and interpersonal dynamic interrelationships (shamed and shamer). Shame can also be used to describe phenomena at many different levels, including internal self-experiences, relational episodes, and cultural practices’. P. Gilbert, ‘What is Shame? Some Core Issues and Controversies’ in P. Gilbert and B. Andrews (eds) Shame: Interpersonal Behaviour, Psychopathology, and Culture, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998, p.4. 8 For work on different historical understandings of shame see D. Konstan, ‘Shame’ in The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2006; B. Williams, Shame and Necessity, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2008; V. Burrus, Saving Shame: Saints, Martyrs and Other Abject Subjects, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2008; Ruth Benedict’s famous study of Japan gave rise to the distinction between ‘shame culture’ and ‘guilt culture’ that is pervasive in modern anthropological thought: see R. Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, Haughton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1989. 9 For an exploration of shame in Renaissance drama see G. Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England, Cornell University Press, Cornell, 1993. For a book of essays on shame in the work of philosophers Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, as well as novelists Hawthorne, Eliot, Lawrence, Faulkner and Morrison see J. Adamson and H. Clark, Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame and Writing, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1999. For a collection of essays on shame in art see C. Pajaczkowska, and I. Ward (eds), Shame and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture, Routledge, London and New York, 2008. 184 contrast to all other [emotions], shame is an experience of the self by the self.’10 But he also claims that shame is an emotional response first provoked in the presence of another: ‘As soon as the infant learns to differentiate the face of the mother from the face of the stranger (approximately seven months of age), he is vulnerable to a shame response.’11 Tomkins argues that the reason the infant is able to feel shame at this point is because with the capacity to differentiate faces, someone is able to appear strange or unfamiliar to them, thus shifting their sense of self within the wider world. From this example the more general rule can be extrapolated that anyone is liable to a shame response if someone looks upon them in a way that is unfamiliar or strange, or because they are doing something unfamiliar or strange. The example that I will highlight below of this instance of original shame in Lear is Cordelia’s surprising response to the love test.

After the gaze of another has generated the feeling of shame, an individual tries to decrease the painful shame-feelings. A traditional response is to try to hide shameful aspects of the self from the gaze of others. A shame response is a reduction of facial or all forms of communication with others by turning away of the eyes and the turning down of the head. Not only do turning away signal distress, but trembling or blushing can follow. As Tomkins describes:

when one hangs one’s head or drops one’s eyelids or averts one’s gaze, one has communicated one’s shame and both the face and the self unwittingly become more visible to the self and others. The very act whose aim it is to reduce facial communication is in some measure self-defeating. Particularly when the face blushes, shame is compounded. And so it happens that one is as ashamed of being ashamed as of anything else.12

10 S. Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, E. Kosofsky Sedgwick and A. Frank (eds), Duke University Press, Durham, 1995, p.136. 11 Ibid. p.140. 12 Ibid. p.137. 185 All our attempts to hide or keep hidden those shameful aspects of ourselves reveal that we have something to hide in the first place. For example, covering our bodies with clothes only draws attention to the fact that we are hiding something. Lear’s banishment of Cordelia only reveals how much he desperately loves her. An automatic, arguably biomechanical, shame response is both tragic and paradoxical because it is likely to produce more painful shame emotions through the very mechanisms designed to reduce the initial shameful feeling.

While most critics tend to assume Lear is mad, the erratic and surprising nature of a shame response befits Lear’s behaviour. By calling it ‘shame’ rather than

‘madness’ we are encouraged to try to understand what he is ashamed of, rather than just writing his actions off as the illogical ravings of a lunatic. As Cavell argues:

shame is the right kind of candidate to serve as a motive, because it is the emotion whose effect is most precipitate and out of proportion with its cause, which is just the rhythm of the King Lear plot as a whole.13

Something is seemingly disproportionate about a shame response to an outsider.

Although we might interpret Lear’s response to the failed love test as ‘incomprehensible or stupid or congenitally arbitrary and inflexible and extreme’, as Cavell notes, ‘shame itself is exactly arbitrary, inflexible and extreme in its effect.’14

So, if Lear is suffering from shame throughout King Lear, of what is he ashamed? There is a variety of opinions as to the causes and nature of Lear’s shame.

Cavell argues that what sustains the dramatic action from before the play to beyond the end is Lear’s shame that he needs love. His ‘avoidance of love’, which Cavell implies is

Lear’s primary motivation, is the avoidance of shamefully revealing himself as needing love, particularly in his final years and especially from Cordelia. Zak and Fernie

13 Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love’, p.286. 14 Ibid. 186 contend that shame is the emotional heart of King Lear, pumping shame throughout the bodies of all the characters in the play. Zak does not specify the nature of the shame. He argues that ‘if, from the abdication onward, Lear flees the sense of disgrace in his acts there, he is also fleeing a deeper and more significant sense of personal worthlessness that make it difficult for him to stop to consider, let alone admit, his specific sins in the opening scene’.15 Zak does not broach the specific details of Lear’s ‘deeper sense of personal worthlessness’, but rather allows his reading to grow out of this general formulation. In contrast, Fernie provides more details. He claims that, ‘Lear’s shame originates from his fear of waning power and his own mortality.’16 In agreement with

Fernie, I argue that, although shame infects all aspects of King Lear, it has a specific and potent manifestation in Lear’s response to the idea of his own mortality and the weakness and powerlessness it brings. It is my contention that Lear, and arguably the audience and all the characters, have to confront Lear’s shameful mortal body out in the storm.

It is important to articulate precisely why Lear is ashamed of his mortality – something Fernie neglects to do – because such a claim is philosophically and politically significant, and directly relates to Lear’s experience out in the storm. Death is a very complicated thing for a monarch because s/he represents immortal authority despite his/her own mortality. I will explain this paradox in more detail below, but in short, Lear’s position as king requires him to try to hide his mortality from the court.

The king’s duty is to perform immortality and, as such, a self-shattering shame around his mortal body is a serious occupational hazard. The king hides his mortality in order to secure his authority, garner the respect and fear of his subjects and promote social

15 W. Zak, Sovereign Shame: a Study of King Lear, Associated University Press, Cranbury, London and Mississauga, 1984, p.60. 16 E. Fernie, Shame in Shakespeare, p.184. 187 cohesion. He performs his authority by hiding his mortality from the court with symbolic costume: crowns, jewels, robes and cloaks cover up the imperfection of the flesh. That the king’s clothes mask his mortal body and represent his authority is by definition a shame response, even if it is not accompanied by shameful feelings within the monarch himself. The tragedy for Lear is that his kingly obligation to hide his mortality is accompanied by shame of his mortality, the powerlessness he has over it and, arguably, the weakness it brings upon the kingdom.

Monarchs have a necessarily evasive relationship with their mortal body. This is a fundamental paradox in constitutional monarchy and now referred to as the problem of the king’s two bodies. Ernst B. Kantorowicz’s seminal study The King’s Two Bodies:

A Study in Medieval Political Theology (1960), explores this problem in full. His citation of early constitutional law describes the two bodies and lays bare the paradox:

the Body natural, consisting of natural Members as every other Man has, and in this he is subject to Passions and Death as other Men are; the other is a Body politic, and the members thereof are his Subjects … this Body is not subject to Passions as the other is, nor to Death, for as to this Body the King never dies, and his natural Death is not called in our Law … the death of the King, but the Demise of the King.17

Despite the fact that the king is mortal, the king cannot die. The king derives his sovereign authority from the legal and political apparatus of the court and the territories of the kingdom, in exchange for power and authority. Quoting Shakespeare’s Henry V,

Kantorowicz defines the dilemma as follows: ‘The king is “twin-born”18 not only with greatness but also with human nature, hence “Subject to the breath of every fool.”’19 In order to circumvent the weakness the king’s mortality brings to an immortal political apparatus, with the ‘demise’ of the king’s ‘body natural’, another king is waiting to take

17 E. B. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, (orig. publ.) Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1997, p.13. 18 Ibid., p.24. 19 Ibid. 188 his place thereby sustaining the immortal authority of the ‘body politic’. The exclamation ‘the king is dead, long live the king!’ is an expression of the conceptual paradox in practice: when one king dies, the kingship and the kingdom lives on in the body of another.

Although systems of inheritance are designed to ensure a seamless transition from one king to another, the transition of the kingdom from one generation to the next is always difficult. In King Lear, the progression from one king to the next is messy for unique reasons.20 He has no male offspring, and hence no one is waiting to inherit the role of King as Hal is at the end of Henry IV, Part 2. Also, no one is trying to kill the king and take his place as in Macbeth and Julius Caesar. If it were not for his mortality, it seems that Lear could just keep on ruling ad infinitum. However, taking his unfortunate mortality into account, Lear could pass the kingdom onto the eldest daughter, Goneril, and her husband Albany upon his ‘demise’. Why he does not do this is not stated in the text. The most straightforward reason is that he does not like Goneril and he wants to both give something to Cordelia, but also, more selfishly, Lear planned to set his rest on her ‘kind nursery’ (1.1.124) in the most ‘opulent’ (1.1.86) third of the kingdom, in order to ‘Unburdened crawl toward death’. Thus, in order to deal with the problem of inheritance, Lear thoroughly breaks with convention and abdicates before

20 A little work has been done on King Lear and the problem of the ‘king’s two bodies’, and the tensions between the ‘body natural’ and the ‘body politic’, but nothing specifically on Lear’s shame around his natural body. Joseph R. Teller’s compelling article explores the tension between ‘body natural’ and ‘body politic’ as represented in Brook’s 1971 film (‘The (Dis)possession of Lear’s Two Bodies: Madness, Demystification, and Domestic Space in Peter Brook’s King Lear, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, Vol.5, No.1, 2010, retrieved from http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers/request?id=782421 28 March 2011). In her nuanced reading of the problem of succession in the play, Emily Sun focuses on the ‘body politic’ (E. Sun, Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure and the Possibility of Politics, Fordham University Press, New York, 2010, pp.42-43); Jane Freeman explores the performance of the two bodies, focusing on the rise of the representation of the ‘body natural’ in 20th century performance (‘Performing the Bodies of King Lear’, Tema: ‘Il Corpo’, No.3, 2006, retrieved from http://www.griseldaonline.it/percorsi/3freeman_print.html, 25 February 2010). 189 his ‘demise’ when he attempts to divide the kingdom, relinquish the crown and live with Cordelia. However, he ends up only going a third of the way. He divides the kingdom and relinquishes the responsibilities of governance, but he retains the title of the king and banishes Cordelia. I argue that Lear’s actions put him in an impossible place for a king, between life and death, thereby exposing Lear to a terrible struggle with his own shameful mortality or ‘body natural’.

Before proceeding, it is important to address the possibility that Lear is not ashamed of his mortality at all. Indeed, it could be argued that Lear’s abdication and division of the kingdom in order to die peacefully is not shame of his mortality, but the very opposite: his abdication implies that Lear is shamelessly mortal. To be sure, there is some shamelessness in his behaviour in 1.1. But crucially, as soon as his abdication is troubled by Cordelia’s response to the love test, he tries to hide his desire to die in comfort by banishing Cordelia and reclaiming the title of the king. As was highlighted above, shame is a relational emotion, occurring in the presence of others, and in this case it is Cordelia’s response to the love test that triggers Lear’s shame. His response not only reveals his shame, but also his most shameful secret: his impossible desire to relinquish all power and ‘Unburdened crawl toward death’.

Aside from silence or sycophancy, Cordelia’s ‘Nothing’ is actually the only possible response to Lear's question because his request is politically impossible: one cannot exchange love for inheritance, it is not how the kingdom works. There is nothing

Cordelia can actually legitimately say to get a third of the kingdom more opulent than her sisters. Cordelia’s response essentially reminds Lear of what he knows already: a king is not allowed to die; his death is a constitutional impossibility, even though paradoxically it is a material reality.

190 The final point that needs to be made about what shame is and how it affects

Lear concerns shame’s potentially transformative or revolutionary capacity. Firstly, shame is in some ways self-sustaining because we can blush because we are ashamed, and then become more ashamed because we feel ourselves blushing. But the self- sustaining nature of shame is surprising in this regard because although we feel shame because we have acted in a way that is socially unacceptable – in Lear’s case it is his admission of mortality and powerlessness that is unacceptable – our shame is sustained by an interest in and desire for the revelation and social acceptance of those aspects of the self one labours to keep hidden. As Tomkins argues, ‘shame is activated by an incomplete reduction of excitement or joy’.21 Tomkins provides the following example of this counter-intuitive aspect of shame: a person may want to make eye-contact with or even smile at a stranger but will be reluctant in case that stranger refuses to look or smile back.22 In the case of Lear, Lear really wants to relinquish all responsibility and die without burden. He is old and understandably tired of ruling, but he is so ashamed of this desire to be weak and in need of care, that as soon as Cordelia complicates the abdication, Lear retreats in shame. He knows that no one will accept him as mortal. But the reason Lear continues to be ashamed is that he genuinely desires to give over his power and die and is reluctant to let go of that fantasy.23 In the next section I demonstrate that Lear moves through shame to a transformative revelation of those shameful aspects of himself. It is my contention that Shakespeare explores the full extent of Lear’s shame response – from its psychological to cosmological significance

21 Tomkins, Shame and its Sisters, p.129. 22 Ibid. 23 The fact that shame is associated with desire is also what makes shameless people so repellent, compelling and, potentially, appealing and attractive. The shameless revel in the unbridled expression of their transgressive desires. We chide them for engaging in activities or expressing qualities that should be shameful. Antagonists are shameless - Iago or Edmund should be ashamed of their actions, desires and ambitions, but they are not, they act without shame. 191 and from it’s stifling to transformative consequences – in the most extraordinary detail during the storm scenes.

4.4. From Shameful Self-Consciousness to Shameless Self-Revelation

In 3.1 a knight describes the physical effect of the storm upon Lear. In response to Kent’s question ‘Where is the King?’ the knight replies:

Contending with the fretful elements, Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea, Or swell the curled waters ‘bove the main, That things might change, or cease; tears his white hair, Which the impetuous blasts with eyeless rage, Catch in their fury and make nothing of, Strives in his little world of man to outscorn The to and fro conflicting wind and rain; This night, wherein the cub-drawn bear would couch, The lion and the belly-pinched wolf Keep their fur dry, unbonneted he runs, And bids what will take all (3.1.4-15).

This passage is an objective description of the material effect of the storm on Lear. He is exposed to a storm that is utterly indifferent to his cries. Although the storm makes

‘nothing’ of Lear, Lear is transformed by his time in the storm. By means of close reading, I now map out the emotional, physical and psychological effect of the storm upon Lear, arguing that the storm provides Lear with a material force to contend with and a means by which he can explore the shame he feels around his ‘body natural’.

What must first be noted is that Goneril and Regan do not cast Lear out in the storm. Rather, they refuse to give both Lear and the knights a lodging: ‘What need one?’ (2.2.455) asks Goneril when they are trying to pry Lear away from his entourage and restore order to the court. Their ultimatum may be callous, inappropriate, even evil and vindictive, but this is what happens. Rather than blaming them for Lear’s exposure to the storm, it is more productive to interrogate why Lear is so reluctant to let go of the knights. Further, it is worth asking why it is he opts to keep the knights and go out into

192 the wild storm instead. In order to discover why he chooses exposure with the knights over shelter without them, I will go back to the event that brings on his shame and sets him on a collision course with the storm: the division of the kingdom.

Although Shakespeare’s play is about many things – love, ingratitude, legitimacy, bastardry, loyalty, deception, the cosmos, fathers, daughters, sons, inheritance, foolishness – the dramatic action is instigated by the king’s decision to abdicate in order to die. At the start of the play, Lear reveals his plan for his fellow court members and the audience. How long he has had this plan is unclear. It seems from the very first lines of the play that the plan to divide the kingdom itself is a new one: Kent says, ‘I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than

Cornwall’ (1.1.1-2) and Gloucester replies: ‘It did always seem so to us, but now in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most, for qualities are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety’ (1.1.3-6).

Indicated by Gloucester’s use of the subordinate clause ‘but now’, the division of the kingdom in three likely comes as quite a shock to the court as well as to those closest to him, Kent and Gloucester, who are also unaware of his plans. Even so, Lear presents the plan in the past tense supported by royal pronouns; he has already decided what is going to happen: ‘Know that we have divided / In three our kingdom’ (1.1.36-37). From

Lear’s point of view, the land is already divided. His presentation of this to the court is a formality. The reason Lear gives for having divided his kingdom is to relinquish the responsibility of ruling (‘To shake all cares and business from our age’ [1.1.38]), for the purposes of future harmony (‘That future strife / May be prevented now’ [1.1.43-44]). If

Lear has already decided this future world in advance, then he has already assumed the outcome of the love test. As Emily Sun points out, ‘Grammatically, his request is not

193 really a question but a command whose answer he has determined in advance.’24 Indeed

Lear’s question is not, ‘Do you love me and, if so, how much?’ but rather, ‘Which of you shall we say doth love us most?’ (1.1.51). Lear assumes, perhaps quite rightly, that his daughters will recognise this test as a formality, but, just in case they are confused,

Lear pretends that he has not already decided how big the portions of the kingdom will be in order to ensure polite compliance with the occasion.

There are many ways to frame Lear’s motives in 1.1. As Cavell summarises,

Lear is understood as either ‘senile, … puerile, (or) not to be understood in natural terms, for the whole scene has a fairy tale or ritualistic character which simply must be accepted as the premise from which the tragedy is derived’.25 But I think the division of the kingdom makes sense to Lear as a king who is very old, tired and close to death. I see Lear’s motives in line with Cavell who insists that:

the man who speaks Lear’s words is in possession, if not fully in command, of a powerful, ranging mind; and its eclipse into madness only confirms its intelligence, not just because what he says in his madness is the work of a marked intelligence, but because of the nature of his madness … its incessant invention.26

According to Cavell, the decision to divide the kingdom, however bold, radical and surprising, is quite logical from Lear’s point of view. David Warner, who played Lear at the Minerva theatre in Chichester in 2005, also approached his performance of this scene from a similar point of view:

Where do you start with the first scene, which has the reputation of being such a difficult one to act, of being an undigested piece of fairy tale that’s needed to set up the rest of the play but which is hard to make convincing emotionally? … As far as I was concerned, however literal-minded the love-test might have looked, it was a ceremony Lear was imposing because he genuinely did see it as the best way of avoiding trouble about the succession.27

24 Sun, Succeeding King Lear, p.19. 25 Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love’, p.286. 26 Ibid., p.288. 27 D. Warner, ‘King Lear’ in M. Dobson (ed.), Performing Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today: The Actor’s Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006, p.134. 194

I would add to this that what motivates Lear is the shameful desire to relax and rest in his final years. In the love test, Lear thinks he has figured out a way to achieve this but instead he ends up dying from grief with the dead body of his favourite daughter in his arms. The fact that his objective fails so catastrophically, and the fact that it is impossible for the king to die, are worthy of interrogation.

Lear’s shameful feelings about his mortal body are only revealed as shame after

Cordelia does not respond to his love test in the way that he imagined. Until Cordelia’s

‘Nothing’ the division is going quite smoothly; it is a unique, but productive day at court. But when Lear asks Cordelia, ‘what can you say to draw / A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak’ (1.1.86-87), Cordelia replies, ‘Nothing, my lord’ (1.1.87).

Lear is shocked by this because he had assumed that he would give Cordelia a more opulent third because he loves her the most and her response was merely supposed to formalise the transaction. His entire future was resting upon the smooth execution of the love test, but Lear had not factored such a surprising response into his plan. In saying

‘Nothing, my lord’ (1.1.87), Cordelia incidentally reveals the tragic impossibility of the plan: Lear is the king and the king cannot die. He immediately and shamefully retreats from his plan with the full force of the king’s power: he banishes Cordelia. This banishment only makes his desperate need for her love more apparent. While a conventional shame response is to blush and turn away one’s gaze, Lear takes this response to its extreme conclusion: he makes Cordelia a ‘stranger to my heart and me’

(1.1.116), so he never has to see her again. Banishing Cordelia at this time is also a desperate attempt to indicate to everyone else that he really does not need her, that he is not weak, old and dying and that he is still independently powerful. Furthermore, when

Kent steps in to Cordelia’s defense he banishes him too – ‘Out of my sight!’ (1.1.158).

Banishment is a king’s way of getting the shame-inducing subjects to move out of the

195 his line of sight, so the king does not have to show weakness through shifting his own gaze for shame.

Left alone and bald-faced mid-abdication, Lear quickly tries to rethink his plan.

More than the banishment of Cordelia and Kent, it is this alternative plan that reveals him as thoroughly ashamed of his mortality. He divides the kingdom in two, ‘With my two daughters’ dowers, digest this third’ (1.1.129). It is only at this point in the drama that Lear decides he needs an entourage of knights and to retain the title ‘King’.

Immediately prior to this speech he was claiming to be shaking all cares and business from his age, and he also revealed that he had thought he would ‘set his rest’ in

Cordelia’s ‘kind nursery’ (1.1.124). Now he no longer has Cordelia, he needs a new plan:

Ourself by monthly course, With reservation of an hundred knights By you to be sustained, shall our abode Make with you by due turn; only we shall retain The name, and all th’addition to a king: the sway, Revenue, execution of the rest, Beloved sons, be yours; which to confirm, This coronet part between you’ (1.1.134-139).

My argument here is that Lear’s retention of the entourage and reclamation of the title

‘king’ is a shame response like the banishment of Cordelia and Kent. (1.1.124). When his initial plan proves impossible, Lear’s plan mutates; he still gives away all power and responsibility but, crucially, he retains the title of the king, ‘th’addition’ or the benefits and an entourage of one hundred knights who call him a king. On the one hand this can be seen as an ersatz version of Cordelia’s ‘kind nursery’, but on the other hand this plan provides Lear with some of the key accessories required to mask his ‘body natural’ and the associated powerlessness. Indeed, the retention of the title of king and the entourage of knights as a way of hiding his weak mortal body is ironic and counter-intuitive in a way only known to shame.

196 The entourage of knights comes to be at the centre of the conflict between Lear and his elder daughters in the first two acts of the play. This conflict comes to a climax as the storm begins to rumble. In this fight, the entourage functions as a synecdoche for the power, authority and privileges of a king. The dramatic conflict in the main plot between 1.1 and 2.2, or between the division of the kingdom and the storm, is all about the knights. The next time we see Goneril she is already complaining that ‘His knights grow riotous’ (1.3.7), and this only escalates throughout the next few scenes.

Eventually, Goneril confronts Lear about the knights’ behaviour:

I do beseech you To understand my purposes aright: As you are old and reverend, should be wise. Here you do keep a hundred knights and squires, Men so disordered, so deboshed and bold, That this our court, is infected with their manners, Shows like a riotous inn. Epicurism and lust Makes it more like a tavern or a brothel Than a graced palace (1.4.229-237).

According to Goneril, riotous knights are bringing shame upon the court. Lear responds by defending his men, ‘My train are men of choice and rarest parts’ (1.4.255) and cursing Goneril for thinking otherwise, ‘Into her womb convey sterility! … How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!’ (1.4.270, 280-281). It is difficult to account for the striking vitriol of Lear's curse. It cannot be explained as brought on by Goneril or as a straightforward expression of Lear’s misogyny: there is something about the nature of their encounter that raises great anger within Lear. I argue that Lear’s contempt for Goneril can be understood as a projection of his own shameful self-loathing at this point in the play. He hates Goneril because she is trying to get him to relinquish his only line of defence against his mortality and weakness. He directs that hate towards her womanhood because he is a misogynist. In the next speech, he declares

197 as much himself: ‘Life and death! I am ashamed that thou hast power to shake my manhood thus’ (1.4.288-289).

Why is Lear emasculated and ashamed by Goneril’s desire to have him reduce his train? As Cavell said, sometimes the effects of shame are surprising because unlike other emotions, in the case of shame the ‘effect is most precipitate and out of proportion with its cause’.28 In other words, in shame cause and effect do not necessarily seem related. This is because not everyone is ashamed of the same thing, and thus not everyone would understand when one is acting out of shame. It is only because Lear is ashamed of his mortality and weakness, that he needs the entourage in the first place and that Goneril’s attempt to diminish his train is so devastating. For another example of this effect, we can turn to Regan. When Regan says ‘I pray you, father, being weak, seem so’ (2.2.393), it does not have to be interpreted as an expression of the machinations of a fundamentally evil individual. It could also be seen as a straightforward, if somewhat tactless, request for Lear to stop trying to control everything and relax. She could even be asking him to ‘Unburdened crawl toward death’, which is what he wants. Further, Regan is also trying to reason with him to get him to relinquish some of his train and return to Goneril. But it is precisely because

Lear is ashamed of the weakness brought about by his mortality, that he feels even more ashamed when Regan draws attention to the fact he is weak. Shame is unpredictable and difficult to handle: as we see with Lear, reason does not appease him.

In fact, so important are his entourage to masking his mortality, that it is at this point in the play that Lear exclaims that he would rather be homeless and exposed to the elements than relinquish the entourage: ‘Return to her? And fifty men dismissed? / No!

Rather I abjure all roofs and choose / To wage against the enmity o’th’ air’ (2.2.399-

28 Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love’, p.186. 198 401). But why would Lear prefer to ‘abjure all roofs’ than dismiss fifty men? There is a logical disconnect here that needs interrogation. Although today the word ‘abjure’ implies a solemn renunciation, historically the term was far more forceful. To abjure meant to swear an oath to renounce something forever. Lear would rather live outdoors forever than diminish his train. One might argue that Lear still sees himself as the all- powerful king and, as such, he has the right to do what he likes and he does not like to be told what to do. One could also argue that he is being manipulative and dramatic, and trying to bully his daughters into capitulating to his desires. Perhaps these are Lear’s initial strategies. But when Goneril and Regan press him to explain why he needs the knights, Lear responds clearly and directly:

GONERIL: What need you five and twenty? Ten? Or five? … REGAN: What need one? LEAR: O Reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in their poorest things superfluous; Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady; If only to go warm were gorgeous, Why, nature needs what gorgeous wear’st, Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But for true need – You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need! You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, As full of grief as age, wretched in both: If it be you that stirs these daughters’ hearts Against their father, fool me not so much To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger, And let not women’s weapons, water-drops, Stain my man’s cheeks. No, you unnatural hags, I will have such revenges on you both That all the world shall – I will do such things – What they are yet I know not, but they shall be The terrors of the earth! You think I’ll weep, No, I’ll not weep. [Storm and tempest] I have full cause for weeping, but this heart Shall break into a thousand flaws Or e’er I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad (2.2.452-470).

The knights, like the ‘gorgeous’ but impractical clothes his daughters wear, hide the cheap and beastly nature of his existence. He wishes his daughters would understand

199 this and enable him to remain indoors. But they do not care for his explanation and make no exceptions. So, when Lear unequivocally refuses to capitulate to his daughters’ demands, and they to his, Lear ‘abjures all roofs’.

Lear’s opting to go out into the storm rather than relinquish his knights confirms the self-sustaining nature of his shame. Lear has been fighting this shame since it was raised by Cordelia in 1.1 and when he banished Cordelia and Kent and retained ‘The name, and all th’addition to a king’ (1.1.137) in response. The self-sustaining nature of a shame response is as integral to sustaining the plausibility of the dramatic action in

King Lear, as Othello’s jealousy is in the conflict of Othello. But unlike jealousy, shame does not ‘mock / The meat it feeds on’ (Ot. 3.3.168-169). Instead, as Kent says of Lear,

‘A sovereign shame so elbows him’ (4.3.43). The shame pushes and shoves Lear around, like a bully refusing to leave him alone. There are two ways of approaching

Lear’s shameful trap. On the one hand, it is possible to see Lear’s shame as a form of self-loathing. As Zak claims, ‘Lear is too ashamed of his shame to face himself.’29 In other words, if Lear’s shame is his mortality or his ‘body natural’, Lear does not want to be mortal and he is too ashamed of himself to fully face it. But, on the other hand, if shame is a social emotion this perspective on shame does not hold. Shame is produced only in the presence of another. So, the other way of looking at the problem is that Lear is too ashamed of being mortal and weak to fully reveal himself to others. For Lear, the two kinds of shame are, of course, linked. The reason he is ashamed is that his mortality is politically impossible and others will not recognise him as a king if he is mortal because a king is not allowed to die. Thus, he labours to keep his mortal body hidden by the knights, in order to try to sustain the veneer of kingly immortality.

So, tragically and ironically, despite shamefully trying to hide his mortal self, by

29 Zak, Sovereign Shame, p.14. 200 his own volition Lear ends up naked, with his aging and animal body battered by the cruel elements, exposed to the heavens, for the other characters and all the audience to see. In the storm, Lear reveals his mortal body to the ‘extremity of the skies’ (3.4.101) and begins to imagine his ideal world: a kingdom that allows a mortal king. I argue that the storm enables Lear to reveal himself as mortal and weak, and that this revelation is both internal and external, individual and social. Although he shamefully tried to hide his mortal weakness in 1.1, in 3.4 he reveals his mortal body to himself and to those around him, including the gods and the audience.

The storm’s material resistance to Lear’s cries makes shameless self-revelation his only option. Lear eventually reveals those aspects of himself he was previously ashamed of and trying to keep hidden from the gaze of others. In order to elucidate precisely how Lear’s attitude towards his own mortality and weakness changes when he is exposed to the meteorological storm’s ‘impetuous blasts and eyeless rage’ (3.1.8) I now undertake a close reading of Lear’s famous passages in the storm scenes, attending in particular to the sequence of the dramatic actions.

Close reading is the most appropriate strategy here because the degree of shameless self-revelation is quite variable in production. In the most recent RSC production of King Lear, Greg Hicks ended up almost naked, with his pallid skin and mortal body exposed (Illus. 23) and with soiled underpants on. Other Lears ended up entirely naked: Sir Ian Holm in 1997, John Bell in Kosky’s 1998 Sydney production, and Sir Ian McKellen in the 2007 RSC production. Although the Folio instructs Lear to deliver his polemic on ‘Unaccomodated man’ while Tearing at his clothes, this is not always how it is represented. In 1845 Edwin Forrest, for example, represented Lear in heroic garb, triumphantly crowned with weeds (Illus. 24). We need not go back as far as the nineteenth century to see a much more triumphant image of Lear, post-storm. Derek

201

Illus. 23 (top): A shameful pair: Greg Hicks as Lear, stripped down, wet from the storm and crowned with weeds, with Geoffrey Freshwater as the blind Gloucester. Illus. 24 (bottom): Edwin Forrest as King Lear, ‘Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds’ (4.4.3).

202 Jacobi from the 2010 Donmar Production (Illus. 22) is in many ways similar to Forrest.

Although Jacobi’s costume is less opulent than Forrest’s at this point, his fleshy, animal nakedness is not exposed. But a close reading of the relation between Lear’s mental and corporal self-revelations and the material storm illuminate a change in Lear’s attitude towards mortality, one that is often neglected both in scholarship and on stage.

When exposed to the storm Lear repeats the same emotional journey he has just been on between 1.1 and 2.2, except at a much faster pace and with a very different outcome. From 3.2 to 3.4 he moves from trying to hide the shame of self-exposure to experiencing a shameless self-revelation. Lear begins by commanding the elements in the same way he commanded the court in the first scene, calling upon the authority of the heavens to flatten the world in order to banish all those who do not show gratitude:

Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers and oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world! Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once That make ingrateful man (3.2.1-9).

Lear instructs the heavens to destroy the world, with a barrage of powerful and violent verbs: blow, crack, rage, drench, drown, singe, strike and spill. He wants wild wind, hurricane and flood to destroy those who are not responsive to his demands. For those unaware of Renaissance meteorological beliefs, the King’s engagement in an active dialogue with the heavens might seem mad, or at the every least, a sign of false consciousness. But although Lear’s desperate dialogue with the storm is an extreme manifestation of his cosmological predisposition, it is nevertheless in keeping with his character’s worldview. Indeed, Lear has an inclination towards seeing his actions in cosmic terms.

203 His first storm speech is similar in tone and form to the speech he used to banish

Cordelia, where he commanded the authority of the heavens to enforce Cordelia’s banishment:

For by the sacred radiance of the sun, The mysteries of Hecate and the night, By all the operation of the orbs From whom we do exist and cease to be, Here I disclaim all my paternal care, Propinquity, and property of blood, And as a stranger to my heart and me Hold thee from this forever. Thy barbarous Scythian, Or he than makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom Be as well neighboured, pitied and relieved, As thou sometime daughter (1.1.110-121).

In both scenes, Lear uses the heavens as a proxy for his authority. The difference between these two speeches is that in 1.1 his position in court gives his claim power.

However, in 3.2, he has no power and the elements do not follow his orders, they simply rain down upon him, utterly indifferent to his desires. If the storm’s indifference to Lear has any straightforward poetic function here, it is metonymic: Lear’s lack of control over the storm is the part that represents his lack of control over the entire kingdom. Nevertheless, the storm’s material indifference to Lear is not just representative of his lack of control; it is shattering for Lear. From his point of view, since before the banishment of Cordelia up to this point in the drama, the heavens have always undergirded his authority as king.

His next speech to the storm is his final appeal. But he has already realised that the meteors are also not on his side. Here he is still trying to contend with the elements and manipulate them in his favour, but in this case it is to garner pity from the storm rather than have it squash his enemies:

Rumble thy bellyful! Spit fire, spout rain! Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters: I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness.

204 I never gave you kingdom, called you children; You owe me no subscription. Why then, let fall Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand your slave, A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man. But yet I call you servile ministers, That will with two pernicious daughters join Your high-engendered battle ‘gainst a head So old and white as this. O ho! ‘tis foul (3.2.14-24).

In this second speech, Lear repeatedly uses the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ to set up a distinction between himself and the storm and to place himself in dialogue with the storm. When the storm does not respond, Lear becomes suspicious that it must be conspiring with his daughters. Lear’s talking to the storm is an attempt to figure out why the world will not let him ‘Unburdened crawl toward death’. Most of the characters in the play have tried to keep Lear from ending up in the storm: Cordelia tried to explain why she could only say ‘Nothing’ to his request, Kent tried to defend her, the Fool tried reverse psychology and Goneril and Regan tried to reason with him with regards to the knights. Nothing worked. But once he figures out that the heavens are against him, he finally realises he has run out of options and has nowhere to hide his mortal body. The non-responsive storm is the thing that finally provokes Lear to respond.

The storm continues and Kent and the Fool encourage him to take shelter. Lear accepts the offer in terms that reveal that a shameless self-revelation of his mortality and weakness is underway:

My wits begin to turn.– [to the Fool] Come on, my boy: how dost, my boy? Art cold? I am cold myself. [To Kent] Where is this straw, my fellow? The art of our necessities is strange, That can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel (3.2.67-71).

There is a significant difference in what Lear claimed as necessary in 2.2 and now. In the earlier scene, he railed about the necessity of a large entourage of knights to mask his wretchedness; now a hovel comes to be as valuable as the entourage. Lear shows a renewed awareness of his body, and a new sensitivity to its brute materiality and its

205 basic needs. The might and power of the violent meteors dwarfs him. This stubborn and irascible force has finally thwarted his capacity to hide his shame. Lear has no choice but to submit to this meteorological violence and reveal himself fully to the cosmos.

The next time we see Lear he is still out in the storm, only this time he is standing beside a hovel and, crucially, he refuses to go in. Kent asks Lear to take shelter three times in the first five lines of 3.4, but Lear refuses to go indoors. Lear’s comments suggest that his is because he needs the storm to both help him feel and prevent him from feeling:

Thou think’st ‘tis much that this contentious storm Invades us to the skin: so ‘tis to thee, But where the greater malady is fix’d, The lesser is scarce felt … When the mind’s free The body’s delicate: this tempest in my mind Doth from my senses take all feeling else, Save what beats there, filial ingratitude … In such a night to shut me out? Pour on, I will endure (3.4.6-18).

If we do not read this passage carefully, or write it off as the ravings of a madman, we could confuse the storm in the sky with the ‘storm’ in Lear’s mind, as A.C. Bradley does:

the explosions of Lear’s passions, and the bursts of rain and thunder, are not, what for the senses they must be, two things, but manifestations of one thing. It is the powers of the tormented soul that we hear and see in the ‘groans of roaring wind and rain’ and the ‘sheets of fire’.30

In contrast, I argue that there are the two storms here: Lear’s internal ‘storm’, which is his struggle with his shameful desire to ‘Unburdened crawl toward death’ and his resentment towards his daughters for not allowing him to do so on his terms; and the meteorological storm itself. The two storms are in homonymic not metaphoric relation.

The storm in the sky is quite literally a storm and the ‘storm’ in Lear’s mind is a

30 A.C. Bradley, ‘Lecture VII on King Lear’ in Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, (orig. publ. 1904) The Echo Library, Fairford, 2006, p.146. 206 metaphor for his emotional quandary. Indeed it is the ‘storm’ in his mind that protects him from fully feeling the storm in the sky. It is also the ‘storm’ in his mind that makes him repeatedly refuse the Fool’s and Kent’s suggestions that he take shelter from the storm in the sky. Lear is now out in the storm by his own volition, wrestling with himself to try to understand his place in the world.

Lear has to find a way out of the bind the storm has him in and, because the storm is entirely unresponsive to his cries, he has to find it within himself. He is angry with his daughters for not allowing him to retain his train and shelter, and so he blames them for his exposure. But really, Lear is searching for something else. Lear is a stubborn old autocrat and he wants things to happen entirely on his own terms. To go indoors means submitting to the suggestions of his daughters as well as Kent,

Gloucester and the Fool and thereby revealing his mortal weakness. The storm enables

Lear to reveal his mortal self in his own terms. An often-overlooked aspect of the plot is that he could have taken shelter in numerous ways at numerous times. Instead Lear chooses to thoroughly expose himself to the storm. Moreover, he chooses to remain exposed to the storm until he has revealed that he is nothing more than a decaying animal, rather than an immortal and powerful symbol of the body politic. This revelation happens just before he retreats to the hovel and takes shelter from the storm.

Lear refuses shelter one last time in order to pray for those who are similarly exposed to the storm – those wretched and mortal individuals who are just like him. His prayer is infused with curiosity. Rather than being disgusted by the wretches’ cheap and beastly lives, he genuinely wonders how these wretches endure such exposure without love:

I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep. [Kneels] Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

207 Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayest shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just (3.4.27-36). Lear’s prayer to those wretches exposed to the storm’s fury triggers a desire for self- reflection and self-revelation with regard to his own physical condition and material situation. Poor Tom conveniently provides Lear with an example of a naked wretch, biding the pelting of the pitilessness of the storm. Lear’s encounter with Poor Tom provokes him to fully confront the physical nature of his body, a body that is shamefully revealed as such when one is unaccommodated and a body that only moments ago he was doggedly trying to hide.

At this point of revelation, where the character appears to really start reflecting upon himself as mortal, Lear’s dialogue shifts from blank verse to prose as if to signal this emotional change within Lear: ‘Why, thou wert better in thy grave than to answer / with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies’ (3.4.100-101). He considers Poor

Tom’s uncovered body in relation to his own:

Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou Ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha? Here’s three on’s us are sophisticated; Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings: come, unbutton here [Tearing at his clothes, he is restrained by Kent and the Fool.] (3.4.101-108).

Stripped of the trappings of kingdom by his daughters and finally freed from the trappings of kingdom by his own volition, Lear comes to completely reveal his mortal body and revel in his weak and lowly nature, that same thing that he was trying to hide back in 1.1 with the ceremonial divestment and the retention of his title and entourage.

As Laurie Shannon has argued, Lear takes this revelry to the extreme through a form of

208 ‘negative exceptionalism’, manifest in his presentation of man as worse off than a worm.31

Lear’s desire to explore his mortal nature is part of a desire for the revelation and acceptance of his shameful self. The king cannot reveal that he is mortal for fear it might destabilises the eternal authority of his kingdom. The storm enables Lear to expose his mortality and embrace that weak and mortal part of himself that he had to keep hidden as king. Lear’s shameful self-revelation borders on reverie; he feels great pleasure in no longer hiding his ‘body natural’. In a matter of two scenes, Lear moves through calling on the storm to flatten his enemies, asking the storm to take pity on him, chiding the storm for siding with his daughters, praying to the storm to pity him, to realising the storm does not serve him and revealing himself.

At this point of self-revelation he becomes most interested in the material conditions that enabled him to reveal himself. No longer operating under the false assumption that the storm is thundering for him, he has a renewed interest in the storm itself. Hence his question to Poor Tom: ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ (3.4.151). This seems like a mad question to those around him given the duration of Lear’s exposure and the storm’s utter indifference to the situation: this is no time for idle philosophising.

For Lear to question the purpose of a storm is outright madness from the perspective of the worldview he held in 1.1, within which the heaven’s purpose was to support and guide his authority. But it is not madness, shame or senility from the perspective of a king who has, since the first scene, been seeking a way to ‘Unburdened crawl toward death’. Thus, the purpose of the storm for Lear is to enable him to shamelessly reveal himself as weak and mortal. His encounter with Poor Tom suggests to him that living in

31 L. Shannon, ‘Poor, Bare, Forked: Animal Sovereignty, Human Negative Exceptionalism and the Natural History of King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol.60, No.2, 2008, pp.168-196. 209 a weak, mortal and wretched state, exposed to a storm, is indeed possible. Once Lear has literally revealed himself as mortal and weak, he is ready to take shelter.

While the storm rages outside, inside the hovel Lear takes his transformation to its logical conclusion: he begins to build a world where it is possible for him to be king and to be weak and mortal. Lear instigates a mock trial, in which Poor Tom is given the role of judge. He wants to make laws against Goneril and Regan’s ‘hard-hearts’

(3.6.76), which in this instance represent the cruelty of a social order that refuses to accommodate Lear’s mortality. In some ways Lear is still taking instruction from the heavens. He acts to make filial love an obligation because the heavens show no mercy.

Furthermore, because he is no longer harbouring the shameful secret that he is both a

King and a mortal, Lear is happy to be flanked by similarly wretched individuals and makes Poor Tom to be one of his entourage too (‘You, sir, I entertain you for one of my hundred’ [3.6.76-77]). At this point, Lear begins to construct a utopia in the hovel where one can live and die as a king. Lear declares himself king of this new world order and is flanked by fools and the wretched of the earth. This fantasy is, on the one hand, the product and symptom of madness, shamelessness, self-indulgence and tragic senility. But, on the other hand, it can also be viewed as Lear’s attempt, however futile, to reconstruct an image of a world in which the laws of kingdom and kingship, as well as kith and kinship, do not contain the paradoxical situation where a necessarily mortal king must shamefully live as if he is immortal.

He continues this reconstruction of an alternative, albeit imaginary, kingdom until his reunion with Cordelia. Crowning himself with weeds (See Illus. 22-24 for examples), Lear instigates a different sovereign order, one that does not demand the king become the immortal figurehead of the ‘body politic’, but rather celebrates his ‘body

210 natural’ and tries to reimagine the ‘body politic’ in its name. Lear revels in the pleasures of this inverted world he constructs for himself:

GLOUCESTER: Is’t not the King? LEAR: Ay, every inch a king. When I do stare, see how the subject quakes. I pardon that man’s life. What was thy cause? Adultery? Thou shalt not die: die for adultery? No! The wren goes to’t and the small gilded fly Does lecher in my sight (4.6.104-112).

The king’s mortality and all the other pleasures of the mortal flesh, from copulation to adultery, are the constitutive principles of his new kingdom. Throughout all this, Lear is now perfectly content to be recognised as a king, despite his wretched, mortal and weak condition. Gloucester is so pleased to have found the king he exclaims, ‘O, let me kiss this hand!’ (4.6.128) and Lear replies: ‘Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality’

(4.6.129). Lear is now shameless about his mortality, but he suspects others might be yet be disgusted by it. Even after the reunion with Cordelia, he is happier to be in prison, than ruling a court shamefully cloaked in immortal robes.

The effect upon Lear of the storm and its indifference, then, is to: make him reveal the part of his self that is mortal, wretched, foul and dirty; embrace that aspect of himself; and revel in the reconstruction of an ideal world where such creaturely humanness – the king’s ‘body natural’ – is accommodated, included and loved. Lear has not come to his senses and submitted to the logic of the kingdom as it was, but rather transformed his opinion on the nature of kingly authority itself and found away to celebrate, at least in his own mind, the wretched mortality of the king.

4.5. Ashamed Characters, Ashamed Critics

In some ways Lear was right to feel ashamed of his ‘body natural’, because no one in the realm of the play finds his mortality socially acceptable. Their contract with

211 the king is such that they award him power and respect his authority, but only if he covers up his mortality and symbolises the immortal authority of the ‘body politic’.

Thus, for a king to reveal himself as mortal is to break this social contract. For the other characters, it is shameful for Lear to expose himself to the storm and therefore they assume he must be mad for prolonging his exposure. This section contends that the characters we trust (Cordelia, Kent, Gloucester, Albany and the Fool) and all those that we do not (Edmund, Cornwall, Goneril and Regan) believe that Lear is acting shamefully; they are ashamed of him on his behalf and they think his desire to remain exposed to the storm is an indication of his madness. While Lear moves through shame and in some ways comes to terms with his mortality, no one else understands his actions in this way. This is the case for audiences of performances too, where the full frontal nudity of Lear causes controversy and scandal, rather than a widespread celebration of dying flesh.32 So, for the purposes of understanding the storm in relation to Lear and to foreshadow the exploration of the storm in relation to the entire dramatic situation in

Chapter Five, it is worth briefly assessing how other characters respond to Lear’s struggle with shame around his ‘body natural’ and then reflect on how this relates to the conventional critical understanding of Lear in the storm.

From early on in the play, the main characters surrounding Lear try to intercept him on the path towards shameful self-revelation and correct his behaviour. Goneril is the most direct. In an early plea to Lear to relinquish the entourage of knights, Goneril shows how Lear’s men and, by extension, Lear himself, are bringing shame upon the court:

I do beseech you To understand my purposes aright:

32 For a popular account of such scandal see C. Davies ‘Sir Ian takes on the nakedness of King Lear’, retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1547193/Sir-Ian-takes-on-the- nakedness-of-King-Lear.html, 6 September, 2011. 212 As you are old and reverend, should be wise. Here you do keep a hundred knights and squires, Men so disordered, so debauched and bold, That this our court, infected with their manners, Shows like a riotous inn. Epicurism and lust Makes it more like a tavern or a brothel Than a graced palace. The shame itself doth speak For instant remedy. Be then desired, By her that else will take the thing she begs. A little to disquantity your train, And the remainders that shall still depend To be such men as may besort your age, Which know themselves, and you (1.2.228-243).

Goneril’s request seems reasonable. The knights are bringing shame upon the court with their riotous behaviour. That is, others will think the court is disgraceful and thus,

Goneril suggests that Lear should relinquish a few of them to keep the integrity of the court. While Lear needs the knights to help him avoid feeling shamefully weak, Goneril is ashamed of the knights because she desires order in her new court.

Out in the storm, all of Lear’s loyal followers either think his behaviour is mad or misguided and try to encourage him to take shelter. Both Gloucester and Kent try to get him to shelter from the storm, not because this is what Lear wants, but because they think a king should be sheltered. The Fool also undertakes the task of encouraging Lear to retreat indoors (‘Prithee, nuncle, be contented; ‘tis a naughty night to swim in’

[3.4.109]). When Lear wonders if Poor Tom has ‘nothing’ because he gave everything to his daughters, the Fool replies with a scathing, albeit ironic, comment about Poor

Tom's shamefully undressed state: ‘Nay, he reserved a blanket, else we had been all shamed’ (3.4.64-65). The Fool’s sarcastic joke implies that Poor Tom is in a far worse state than Lear, and that Lear is mad for comparing himself to the beggar, but also there is a moralising tone to the Fool’s jest that implies that Lear is actually acting more shamefully than Poor Tom. Finally, although Gloucester does not think Lear is of sound mind and wants him to shelter, his loyalty to the king also produces some shame within

213 him on Lear’s behalf. Gloucester is ashamed for Lear for keeping the company of Poor

Tom (‘What, hath your grace no better company?’ [3.4.138]). Gloucester’s opinion of

Poor Tom is ironic because, of course, it is Edgar in disguise, but it is also meaningful expression of Gloucester’s opinion of the situation: these wretched conditions do not befit a king.

When Lear comes to expose himself to the storm in his transformative moment of shameless self-revelation, Kent and the Fool try to keep him clothed. As the Folio direction states, Tearing at his clothes, he is restrained by Kent and the Fool. As loyal as they are, the Fool and Kent are acting like Goneril. They do not aim to understand

Lear’s perspective but relentlessly try to convince him that he is wrong; arguably, they restrain Lear from taking off his clothes because they too feel ashamed of his weak and exposed body on his behalf and also they do not see any logical motive in his wanting to be exposed to the storm. Furthermore, it is at this moment that a director has to decide just how much of Lear’s ‘body natural’ we actually get to see. If the Fool and

Kent are directed to swiftly restrain him from taking off his clothes, we do not have to look at Lear’s shameful mortal body. In contrast, if Lear is successful in tearing at his clothes, his mortal body is shamelessly revealed for everyone to see.

Cordelia laments Lear’s behaviour too. When she returns to England, her first words lament Lear’s madness and issue a request for military support to help restore him to sanity:

Alack, ‘tis he. Why, he was met even now As mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud, Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow weeds, With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, Darnel and all the idle weeds that grown in our sustaining corn. [to Officer] A century send forth; Search every acre in the high-grown field And bring him to our eye. What can man’s wisdom In the restoring his bereaved sense, He that helps him take all my outward worth (4.4.1-10).

214

For Lear the crown is a celebration of his newfound shamelessness and his celebration of the ‘body natural’, but for Cordelia this is a sign that her father is completely mad.

While Lear goes on a journey that coheres with the desires of his character as laid out in

1.1, the other characters see how tragically he hurtles towards disaster, both for himself and the political realm, and try to steer him off course.

The only character that really complicates this perspective within the drama is

Edgar. Poor Tom, the person that Lear recognises as kith and thus enables his transformation, is, of course, Edgar in disguise. Edgar is not really the wretched of the earth. He is the legitimate son, outcast and in hiding. He is not really ‘the thing itself’

(3.4.105), as Lear so confidently declares when he sees him in the storm; he is just playing at being ‘unaccommodated man’ (3.4.106). That Lear’s shameful transformation is enabled by an encounter with a character in disguise complicates the significance of his transformation. Rather than appearing as a civilised and sane man who has been outcast from civilisation, Edgar decides to hide this aspect of himself in order to preserve himself: ‘My face I’ll grime with filth, / Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots / And with presented nakedness outface / The winds and persecutions of the sky’ (2.2.183-186). Edgar dresses in such a manner to elicit sympathy, hoping to draw ‘charity’ (2.2.194) from someone along the way. Edgar is disguised as a wretch able to survive despite the exposure of his mortal body. But Edgar the character is an industrious man with a foolproof strategy for extracting sympathy from others. The one time Poor Tom reveals himself as Edgar, he does so in an aside that shows his struggle to remain indifferent to the tragedy unfolding in front of his eyes: ‘My tears begin to take his part so much / They mar my counterfeiting’ (3.4.58-59). It is unclear if he thinks the behaviour in the hovel is shameful or just tragic and sad. Likewise, it is unclear whether he feels guilty for opting out of the action and hiding as Poor Tom,

215 having seen the state into which the kingdom has descended. Edgar is the one character that never clearly states what he thinks of Lear’s behaviour, though what is made apparent is that he too does not fathom Lear’s yearning to transcend his paradoxical situation.

So, the other characters do not understand Lear’s shameless transformation in the same way as Lear. Indeed, with the exception of Edgar, most of the characters think it is both shameful and mad for Lear to be naked and exposed to a storm. The behaviour itself is shameful and his desire to remain outdoors and to expose himself further by tearing off his clothes is an indication of his madness. Lear’s behaviour is shameful because it is socially and politically unacceptable for a king to reveal himself as mortal.

It is shameful to do so because it reveals the king, and by extension the kingdom, as weak and powerless, like a Bedlam Beggar. Indeed, for the king to reveal himself as mortal exposes the constitutive paradox of the kingdom and the fundamentally unstable premise of monarchic authority. Furthermore, from the perspective of the other characters’ no one should want to both reveal and revel in the decrepitude of their mortal, old and animal body and no one should want to be naked and exposed to a storm, let alone a king who is meant to symbolise immortality; therefore he must be mad. With the exception of Edgar, whose perspective remains ambiguous in the text, all of the characters view Lear’s behaviour in this way; the only difference is that some characters take pity on him and others do not.

Critics have long held a similar position to these characters. Indeed, Lamb’s early response to Shakespeare’s play remains somewhat typical of the spectator’s position today. For Lamb, the storm highlights Lear’s mortality and weakness, and demonstrates that his rage is rendered impotent by the storm. But this is not something

216 that Lamb wants to see and it is the reason why Lamb argues that Shakespeare’s King

Lear should not be staged:

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 him to take 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 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 of that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare.33.

For Lamb, Lear’s experience in the storm is not a transformative shameless self- revelation that reveals the constitutive paradox of monarchy itself, but a painful and disgusting exposé of the monarch’s fundamental weakness and powerlessness. In advocating the reading of King Lear over watching it on stage, Lamb constructs an impression of Lear’s mind as somehow distinct from his dying body. Indeed, the subsequent attempt to turn the staged storm into a symbol for Lear’s mind is itself an ashamed gesture evading the brute reality of Lear’s mortality, by retreating into the fantasy of a mind that transcends the body. But Lear is mortal, the storm is pitiless and no one mentally apprehends this better than the ‘poor, bare, forked animal’ (3.4.106-

107) that is Lear when he is physically exposed to the storm.

The perspective of the characters – that Lear’s behaviour in the storm is shameful and mad – is one that has captivated the critical imagination and prevented us from trying to understand the perspective of Lear throughout the action. Thus far, we have failed to see the importance of the storm itself in Lear’s emotional transformation, not only because we have for a long time seen the storm in a symbolic light, but also the

33 Lamb, ‘On the tragedies of Shakespeare: Considered With Reference To Their Fitness For Stage Representation’, p.574.

217 only character who has such an explicitly meaningful encounter with the storm is Lear.

Indeed, he seems doubly mad today due to the historical distance between the time when there were more meaningful cosmological links between kings and storms and the present day.

4.6. Conclusion

The effect of the storm upon Lear is that he is able to fully reveal himself as mortal and weak. While he initially desired to ‘Unburdened crawl toward death’, the contention of this chapter was that Cordelia’s surprising response to the love test provoked a swift and shameful retreat from his stated intention. In responding with

‘Nothing’ to his request for love in exchange for kingdom, Cordelia reveals the king’s desire to die without responsibilities to his kingdom as a tragic impossibility. Lear knows that his obligation as king is to feign immortality until his ‘demise’, and he shamefully retreats from this desire to relinquish power in order to die happily by banishing Cordelia and Kent for drawing attention to his shameful mortal weakness, and also by retaining an entourage of knights and the title and accoutrements of the king to hide his ‘body natural’. Although Lear is thoroughly ashamed of his desire, and ashamed of ever revealing his cardinal weakness in court, Lear does not let go of the hope that he will be able to shed the trappings of the king’s robes and revel in his mortal infirmity.

The argument of this chapter is that the storm itself enables Lear to reveal his

‘body natural’ precisely because of its indifference to his desires. The storm is Lear’s last line of appeal. He tries to harness the power of the storm and then pleads with the storm to pity him, but the storm does not respond. At this point Lear begins to reflect back upon himself and consider the nature of his place in the world in relation to the

218 indifferent storm. The cold material violence of the elements on his body produces a shameless self-revelation within the character.

While Lear comes to a new understanding of himself and his place in the world by working through his shame, the other characters in the play do not understand Lear’s dilemma. Those who are not as sympathetic to his plight see his behaviour as shameful and those who actually care for him, including many critics and spectators, think he is mad. Although there is catharsis in Lear’s personal revelation during the storm, ultimately it is a tragic impossibility: Lear is not allowed to ‘Unburdened crawl toward death’ because he is a Renaissance king. The tragic impossibility of this desire is brought to centre stage in Lear’s horrifically burdened death from grief, with the dead body of Cordelia in his arms. Although what Lear realises in the storm is impossible, the storm has a physical impact upon Lear nonetheless. But the impact of the storm upon Lear is not the extent of the material storm’s effect upon the play. In the next chapter I provide a counterpoint to what I have explored by considering the disastrous effect of the material storm upon the entire kingdom.

219 Chapter 5

‘This pitiless storm’ King Lear as a Natural Disaster

Even though storms are sometimes considered signs from God or the gods, the storm in King Lear has always been seen more like the trigger of a natural disaster than a providential sign. Religious radicals who interpret storms as God’s wrath seek comfort in a divine explanation because, despite the seeming randomness of God’s punishment, it at least offers the possibility that our future actions can insure us against the cruelty of nature. A providential sign is constructed as such by means of a retrospective report on the origins of the heavenly event. This is a cunning strategy because such a report, however fallacious, cannot be verified as untrue: ‘by elementall causes, as fire, aire, water, and earth, hee shewes his universal power’1, claimed the

Puritan scholar William Fulke several months after a powerful storm devastated

London. Providential signs are past events and a narrative is constructed to clearly explain the effects in terms of their heavenly causes. But in a ‘natural disaster’ a powerful physical force interrupts the present and changes the course of history. So, although Steve Mentz has argued that King Lear offers Shakespeare’s representation of how ‘a providential storm feels against your skin’,2 this chapter argues that, more than

Lear’s sensory experience of the elements against his skin, this storm triggers a ‘natural disaster’ that utterly changes the trajectory of the dramatic narrative.

In early 2012, the United Nations released a 594-page manual entitled Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. The document outlines how nation states should organise themselves in order to mitigate the

1 W. Fulke A Goodly Gallery, (orig. publ. 1563) 1571, retrieved from Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyck.com, 14 September 2011, p.A2. 2 S. Mentz, 'Strange Weather in King Lear', Shakespeare, Vol.6, No.2, June 2010, (pp.139-152) p.141. 220 effects of physical events, including hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes and floods.3 Such events, it is argued, will become more severe as the planet warms.4 In the document

‘natural disasters’ are defined as:

severe alterations in the normal functioning of a community or society due to hazardous physical events interacting with vulnerable social conditions, leading to widespread adverse human, material, economic, or environmental effects that require immediate emergency response to satisfy critical human needs and that may require external support for recovery.5

In recent years there has been a marked tendency to provide a definition of ‘natural disaster’ that incorporates the social and political dimensions of the event. Interestingly, a whole field of disaster studies has opened up within history and anthropology rather than the physical sciences.6 In this field, natural disasters are thought to occur at the

‘intersection between nature and culture and illustrate, often dramatically, the mutuality of each in the constitution of the other’.7 The general consensus is that a natural disaster is neither simply a violent storm, nor the effects of a storm or flood, for example, but rather the interaction between the storm and the social and political landscape it destroys.

This chapter uses this dynamic definition of natural disaster to animate the relationship between the material force of the storm and human drama of King Lear.

While the critical tradition tends to see the storm as symbolically associated with Lear, this chapter aims to further challenge that long-held assumption by physically linking the storm to other dimensions of the human drama. Indeed, it is the argument of this

3 V. Barros, C. Field, D. Qin and T. Stocker (eds), Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation, retrieved from http://ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/, 2 April 2012, p.31. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 See A. Janku, G. Schenk and F. Mauelschagen, Historical Disasters in Context: Science, Religion and Politics, Routledge, London and New York, 2011. 7 A. Oliver-Smith and S. M. Hoffman, ‘Introduction: Why Anthropologists Should Study Disasters’, in Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster, School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, 2002, p.24. 221 chapter that the storm interacts with a state weakened by the division of the kingdom, vulnerable due to the erratic behaviour of the king, troubled by further divisions between Albany and Cornwall and threatened by the imminent invasion from France to produce a natural disaster. This chapter reveals not only Lear, but also the kingdom itself as unable to weather the storm. Further, as a result of what happens during and immediately after the storm, the kingdom plummets even more swiftly into war.

But ‘natural disaster’ is not a synonym for tragedy. A natural disaster can produce a tragedy, but a tragedy is something different to a natural disaster. In King

Lear, the tragedy is the death of Cordelia, the downfall of Lear and the pathos and catharsis produced within the audience as a result of this profound representation of failure. The causes of the tragedy of King Lear are multiple and ultimately stem from

Lear’s tragic error in the division of the kingdom and divestment of power. The effect of the tragedy is dependent on the style of the production and the context of the audience as well. As such, natural disaster is not used here as a synonym for tragedy, as it may be in the news media. Rather, to think of King Lear as the dramatisation of a natural disaster is to provide a contemporary conceptualisation of the storm’s physical role not only in Lear’s downfall, but also in the complete destruction of the social order.

The interpretation offered in this chapter is located between two existing branches of King Lear scholarship and the first section outlines these hitherto distinct ways reading the play. The first way of reading of the play is as a socio-political drama, extending the effects of Lear’s actions to include the other characters and to reflect upon the other characters’ involvement in the tragedy. This mode fails to interrogate the storm’s role in the drama. The second strategy for reading is much more recent and to tries to animate the storm as a material force within the drama, but fails to properly interrogate its meaningful involvement not only in Lear’s journey but in the socio-

222 political dimensions of the drama. This chapter pleaches these two branches of Lear scholarship, so the storm becomes part of an analysis of the socio-political drama and the socio-political drama links to the storm.

The second section rethinks the geopolitics of the heath and, contrary to the critical tradition that sees the heath as somewhere outside the kingdom, argues that the storm scenes either play out within the kingdom or in a liminal space between the two halves of the kingdom. The third section provides a close reading of Gloucester’s experience in the storm in order to illustrate both the complexity of another character’s journey and his involvement in the political catastrophe. Then, in the fourth section, the storm is interpreted as a catalyst of a ‘natural disaster’ because it draws out the characters’ political loyalties, the exposure of which causes an acceleration of the conflict and the kingdom’s swift descent into war. This action ultimately precipitates the deaths of Cornwall, Oswald, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, Edmund, Kent and the Fool.

Overall, this chapter views the storm as structurally central to the play as a whole and frames King Lear as a ‘natural disaster’ because of the way in which the storm interrupts and alters the dramatic narrative causing death and destruction in the kingdom.

5.1. Linking the Socio-Political Drama to the Storm

In response to a claim that the biggest challenge for a theatre artist in staging

King Lear is the creation of the storm, Peter Brook argued that the storm is really secondary to the task of animating all the different strands of the dramatic narrative:

Lear, for example, has been very much mishandled and mistreated because people haven’t recognized the fact that King Lear is not a play about King Lear … in a way that, from a certain point of view, Hamlet is about Hamlet. All the other characters are essential and are marvellous playing parts but they all relate to Hamlet. Hamlet is the pivot of all activity in the play

223 while, in Lear, the total structure of the play is the composite of eight or ten independent and equally important strands of narrative … And I think that it is here – rather than in the problem of staging the storm – that the real challenge and the real difficulty of Lear lie.8

This thesis has argued that the reason we have not read the storm itself as integral to the action is largely because we are utterly fixated on understanding Lear’s point of view.

Here Brook acknowledges this obsession with Lear as an explicit obstacle to a comprehensive understanding of the play. He provokes us to consider how King Lear’s complexity lies in the fact that all the threads of the plot are equally important and come together to constitute the drama. The aim of this chapter is to assess the storm’s role across the many threads of the dramatic narrative, including those where Lear is not the pivot.

In his influential book Radical Tragedy, Jonathan Dollimore also opens the criticism of the play out from a focus on Lear to the social and political world of the drama. Dollimore shows that the dominant trend has been to characterise King Lear as a drama about the so-called essential qualities of an individual man, such as autonomy, morality and self-determination.9 He summarises the conclusions that are drawn about the storm scenes when Lear is understood as an autonomous individual:

When he is on the heath King Lear is moved to pity. As unaccommodated man he feels what wretches feel. For the humanist the tragic paradox arises here: debasement gives rise to dignity and at the moment when Lear might be expected to be most brutalised he becomes most human.10

8 P. Brook, ‘Lear – can it be staged?’ in The Shifting Point: Forty Years of Theatrical Exploration 1946-1987, Methuen Drama, London, 1988, p.89. 9 For examples of humanist readings of Lear, Dollimore points to: A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Macmillan, London, 1952; R. Ornstein, The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, Greenwood Press, Westport, 1975; G. Kozintsev, King Lear: The Space of Tragedy, Heinemann, London, 1977. J. Dollimore, ‘King Lear and Essentialist Humanism’ in Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, Harvester Press, Brighton, 1984, (pp.189-203) p.285. 10 Ibid., p.189. 224

But Dollimore challenges the traditional individualist reading of Lear’s realisation in the storm. To the contrary, he argues that Lear’s confrontation with ‘unaccommodated’ man during the storm does not dramatise a notion of essential self-determined autonomy, but precisely the opposite. He insists that Lear ‘offers … a decentring of the tragic subject which in turn becomes the focus of a more general exploration of human consciousness in relation to social being’.11 In this ‘anti-individualist’ reading of King Lear, Lear is an interdependent and social character. Lear is not autonomous. Rather his confrontation with ‘Unaccommodated man’ reveals to Lear that he is bound to a wider human community, a community that he failed to properly assist during his time as king. But although he encourages us to see the story beyond Lear, Dollimore does not consider the storm in his conclusions.

More recent studies have undertaken the task of articulating the significance of the storm itself. Steve Mentz characterises it as a storm, but the fact it is part of a larger dramatic narrative is an afterthought that arises altogether separately from his reading of the storm in relation to Lear:

Reading the storm scenes through their parallels with the post- equilibrium shift in ecological thinking brings out their powerful representation of natural chaos. But it also seems meaningful … that there is no real storm on stage: it is all a play. Tin sheets, rattled backstage, cause this thunder. The storm scenes explore the limits of theatricality, insisting that the audience understand the actor’s body on stage as both imaginatively inside and literally apart from the hostile nature that the play’s fictional world creates. The body on stage, like the body in the storm, functions as a boundary between raw experience and the narratives humans create to order experience.12

11 Ibid., p.202. 12 S. Mentz, 'Strange Weather in King Lear', Shakespeare, Vol.6, No.2, June 2010, (pp.139-152) pp.145-6. 225 On the one hand, Mentz suggests King Lear’s storm is an example of a particular ecological model where nature is perceived as disorderly, unpredictable and ever changing. But on the other hand, he observes that a storm within the controlled environment of the play is not so chaotic at all. For Mentz the characters on stage are positioned at a border between the perceived chaos of nature, represented in the storm, and the apparent order of human narratives, played out by the characters. But here is where his analysis ends. In contrast, what this chapter aims to illustrate is that the two are much more involved with each other than this. Whatever ecological model best describes the storm itself, the human experience is thoroughly complicated by the storm. Indeed, the characters must endure this storm; the narratives they had previously created to order their experience are radically altered by the storm’s physical presence within their journeys.

Gwilym Jones does not draw as sharp a distinction between storm and story as

Mentz, but he trivialises the relationship between the physical force of the storm and the dramatic narrative and does not pursue their meaningful entanglement. He claims that the storm in King Lear is ‘just a storm’. For Jones, the storm is not divine or demonic in origin. There is nothing magical or supernatural about it; it is a meteorological event. In this basic sense he is correct. No devils or witches emerge from this storm. For Jones

‘the interpretation machine which seeks its origins and meaning as a storm is the domain of the characters. If we as critics engage in the same interpretation, we inevitably alter the means by which the characters are to be imagined’.13 This is true. If we draw our interpretation of the storm from the point of view of a character, we will alter our understanding of that character. For instance, reading the storm as an extension of Lear’s mind affords Lear far more power than he actually has within the drama.

13 G. Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Sussex, 2010, Sussex Research Online, retrieved from http://eprints.sussex.ac.uk, 19 August 2010, p.89. 226 Indeed, if we trust one character’s perspectives on the storm, we are led to misinterpret both the character and the storm, because no character fully understands the storm. But although the storm might not have any clearly anthropocentric function, the characters’ flawed perspectives and the kingdom’s subsequent descent into civil war are part of the storm’s significance and meaning. That is to say, there is no such thing as ‘just a storm’; a storm is always more than the sum of its parts, including the characters’ misrecognition of its ‘impetuous blasts’ and ‘eyeless rage’ (3.1.8).

5.2. Where is the Storm?

In addition to the above, the storm is more than the sum of its parts because it does not respect human geopolitical borders. In the conventional reading, Lear and his followers are taken to be on the heath during the storm. This section aims to reassess the location of the storm and complicate the storm’s relationship to the geopolitics of the kingdom. Gwilym Jones has argued that ‘there is a disturbing and distorting act of displacement in localising meaning in King Lear and nowhere is this more pronounced than in the repetition of the heath’ as used in relation to the storm. As such we need to complicate our imagining of the location of the storm scenes. For although Jones argues in contrast that ‘there is no location, there is only event’,14 here the argument is that the complex geopolitical location of the storm scenes is actually integral to the conflict.

Information about the storm’s setting is scarce in the text. Shakespeare does not call the location of Act Three a heath in the play text and the Folio stage directions do not indicate a location for the storm scenes. The only sense we get of what the landscape is like outside the castle is from Gloucester who describes it for us while watching Lear disappear into the storm: ‘For many miles about / There’s scarce a bush’

14 Ibid., 72. 227 (2.2.494-5). As James Ogden’s and Henry S. Turner’s have already demonstrated, the heath is Nahum Tate’s invention. The word first appears in the stage directions of Tate’s

1681 adaptation. Then Nicholas Rowe appropriated the stage direction in his 1709 edition of Shakespeare’s King Lear.15 Even so, as Gwilym Jones observes, ‘when Lear is described as at a location (during the storm), it is almost inevitably the heath’.16 But as Jones has also pointed out, the word ‘heath’ radically simplifies the action of the storm. Lear’s journey in the storm moves from castle to heath to hovel. With nowhere to go after the storm Lear finds himself walking across battlefields to the beach.17 Thus the action of the storm scenes is not confined to one location. Indeed, the action of the storm scenes crosses all kinds of locations: indoors sheltering from the storm and outdoors exposed to the storm, as well as inside and outside the kingdom. The storm in the dramatic world does not seem confined to any particular geopolitical or geographical location, just as storms in the real world typically do not respect human borders.

Although the geopolitical situation is unstable and the action plays out over multiple settings, Lear and his followers are generally conceived of as strictly outside the kingdom during the storm. Indeed, according to Peter Womack, the heath is a kind of terra nullius upon which the characters are engaged in ‘ineffectual hanging about’:18

In Acts 3 and 4 ... the theatrical interest is perversely invested in a collection of characters ... who are no longer, or not yet, the subjects of any recognizable dramatic action. Cut off from real interaction by madness, blindness or pretence, they wander in an empty landscape,

15 J. Ogden, ‘Lear’s Blasted Heath’ in J. Ogden and A. Scouten (eds), Lear from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism Associated University Press, Cranbury, London, Mississauga, 1997.; H. Turner, ‘King Lear Without: The Heath, Renaissance Drama: New Series, 28, 1999, pp.161- 193. 16 Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms, p.71. 17 Ibid., p.78. 18 P. Womack, ‘Secularizing King Lear: Shakespeare, Tate and the sacred’, P. Holland (ed.), Shakespeare Survey 55: King Lear and its Afterlife, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, (pp.96-105) p.98. 228 absorbed in their own suffering or exchanging fragmentary messages about actions which may be taking place elsewhere.19

This is not inaccurate: the play does indeed dramatise the passions of an old king wandering, half-naked and self-absorbed, out on a wild stormy night, while offstage his kingdom descends into civil war. The action may appear separate from the political drama. But it is the contention of this chapter that the action of the storm scenes is thoroughly involved in the wider political drama. Thus the first step is to complicate how we view the geopolitical situation of the storm scenes.

In a close reading of the play, Emily Sun also characterises the storm scenes as located ‘outside of political space’. Nevertheless, a sustained critical engagement with her provocative interpretation actually affords a useful way of both positioning the storm scenes within the jurisdiction of the divided kingdom and tying the storm itself to the political drama. In Act Three

the stage becomes a heath on which characters find themselves outside of political space and exposed to the elements. In showing the character’s exposure to the elements, however, the play shows that the characters thereby avoid precisely being exposed to each other, and thus remain tragically caught within a sovereign determination of the human … the heath thus serves as a site of transformation – not so much of the relationships between the characters within the play as of the relationship of the play to the audience. Serving such a function the heath may be compared to what critics call, after Northrop Frye, the ‘green world’ in Shakespearean comedy, a space of exile and errancy in which the normal political order is suspended, identities of characters exchanged and transformed, and the kingdom thereby regenerated. Taking the archetype of the waste-land (sic), the heath is the anti-type to the fertile, life-affirming green world: it does not serve as a site of regeneration for the characters or of the kingdom. Nevertheless, the heath serves as a watershed to the extent that the play begins thereafter to transform itself.20

19 Ibid., p.99. 20 Sun, Succeeding King Lear, p.36 229 Sun’s characterisation of the setting as an ‘anti-type … green world’, offers a useful way of conceptualising the geopolitical location the storm scenes, which in turn assists in conceiving of the action of the scenes as part of the political conflict.

Beyond the fact that King Lear is a tragedy, how is the heath the ‘anti-type’ to the ‘green world’ of Shakespearean comedy? Sun claims that the setting draws on ‘the archetype of the waste-land’, but Sun’s reference to the wasteland is more like an off- handed comment inspired by the stereotypical mid-to-late twentieth century theatrical representations of King Lear, than anything particularly meaningful. In contrast, the contention here is that the locations of the storm scenes is an ‘anti-type to the green world’ for three key reasons. Firstly because of the geopolitical ambiguity of the scenes, secondly because the omnipresence of the storm and thirdly because Lear arguably misrecognises the locations he occupies as a kind of ‘green world’. As such, the claim that the storm scenes play out in an ‘anti-green world’ is not simply because the heavy rains would likely turn any green grass to brown mud!

For Northrop Frye the ‘green world’ is a space outside the political world where dreams and desires can be tested and realised without fear of retribution, like the forest of Arden in As You Like It or the wooded dreamscape in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

the green world has analogies, not only to the fertile world of ritual, but to the dream world that we create out of our own desires. This dream world collides with the stumbling and blinded follies of the world of experience, and yet proves strong enough to impose the form of desire on it.21

A ‘green world’ is a location where characters are somewhat freed from the decorum required of them in court – distant from the laws that regulate their behaviour – and can revel in their desires. For example, in As You Like It the characters that are forbidden to fall in love within the jurisdiction of the kingdom are free to fall in love in Arden.

21 N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Atheneum, New York, 1979, p.183-184. 230 As was mentioned above, in King Lear the characters are not as free to behave like Rosalind and Orlando, firstly because they are not physically far enough away from the kingdom to be truly unrestrained by its laws. All the characters are still bound by the laws of the kingdom as they are not actually outside political space; indeed, Lear, Kent, the Fool and Gloucester are all seen as traitors at this point in the play. They are trying to make their way to Dover to actually leave the kingdom and find a safe passage to and refuge in another kingdom altogether. Secondly, all the characters except Lear are motivated by the very real desire to take shelter from the wild storm. There is not a tempest so wild that a ‘cub-drawn bear would couch’ and ‘the lion and belly-pinched wolf / keep their fur dry’ (3.1.12-14) when Rosalind and Orlando are falling in love, but there is in King Lear. Here a powerful storm blasts the heath and the only one willing to go out in it is Lear, who does so ‘unbonneted … and bids what will take all’ (3.1.14-

15). In King Lear the simple fact that the characters want to take shelter from the storm thwarts the heath’s capacity as a site of experimentation and transformation for everyone except Lear.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, Lear does act as if the heath is a ‘green world’ but his will is not ‘strong enough to impose the form of desire’ on the world itself. This is not only because storm does not play along with him, but also because none of the other characters do either. The storm does not play along because it is utterly indifferent to the situation and the characters do not play along because they are aware of the actual political stakes of the situation. Stemming from this, Sun’s claim that the characters remain ‘tragically caught within a sovereign determination of the human’ needs some rethinking too. Sun implies that the characters should take the opportunity of the storm scenes to rethink their place in the world and that the tragedy is that they do not. On the one hand, Lear does actually use his time in the storm to

231 remake himself, to wish his way out of his particular determination as sovereign, no less. But on the other hand, because of both the dire political situation and the storm, none of the other characters can actually take the time to reimagine themselves. Who knows what kind of bacchanalian ‘green world’ orgy might have erupted on the heath if there had been a magical forest of trees to hide in, away from the laws of the kingdom; who knows what kind of pixies the Fool and Lear may have encountered if they had not needed to shelter from the storm? But for most of the characters, the increasingly dire political situation and their exposure to the material violence of the storm activates their conservative impulses: they want to retreat indoors and they encourage Lear to do so as well.

Thus, the storm plays out within the kingdom, or at least close enough to its borders that those out in the storm are not far enough away to be safe and free. Indeed the idea that it is outside the kingdom and that the characters are ineffectually hanging about is a tragic misrecognition of the circumstances, similar in kind to Lear’s own misrecognition of his situation. As such, in the next two sections, this chapter will explore the actions of the other characters during the storm and observe how the storm triggers a natural disaster by forcing all the characters to suddenly display their political loyalties because of their concern for the king’s exposure to the storm.

5.3. Gloucester in the Storm

A close reading of Gloucester’s journey through the storm, paying attention to his motivations, his actions and the consequences, reveals just how politically significant his actions are during the storm scenes. This in turn serves as an example of just how political all the characters’ actions are in the storm scenes.

232 When the king has left the stage in ‘high rage’ (2.2.488), Gloucester incidentally reveals to Cornwall, Regan and Goneril that his loyalties lie with the king. Before he receives explicit orders not to go out in the storm, he follows ‘the old man forth’

(2.2.287) but he returns inside to shelter from the storm. That he is sheltered while Lear is exposed troubles Gloucester: ‘Alack the night comes on, and the high winds / Do sorely ruffle; for miles about / There’s scarce a bush’ (2.2.493-495). Gloucester’s line is a simple descriptive lamentation concerning what he sees offstage: the encroaching night and the bleak, storm-swept and heath-like landscape out onto which Lear has wandered.

But Gloucester’s line is also a euphemism for his concern for the king and criticism of

Goneril, Regan and Cornwall’s lack of sympathy for Lear’s situation. The euphemism is a subtle attempt to convince them to take in Lear and his knights because the storm is so wild. As a statement of loyalty, Gloucester’s line is the beginning of his downfall. The storm precipitates Gloucester’s downfall by provoking him to take sides in the political drama because of his sympathy for Lear’s exposure to the storm.

Cornwall then uses the storm as a way of warning Gloucester not to assist the king. Cornwall instructs Gloucester to ‘Shut up your doors, ‘tis a wild night. / … come out o’the storm’ (2.2.501-2). This line can be read as an indication of Cornwall’s callousness and divisive political ambition. But reading it as such does not preclude understanding the storm itself as a legitimate reason for Cornwall to command

Gloucester to close the door. In the first instance, Cornwall gives Gloucester a clear, descriptive order: shut the door and stay inside during storm. As a euphemism, however,

‘shut up your doors … come out o’the storm’ implies that following the king will be considered a traitorous act. Euphemisms can, of course, operate either metaphorically or metonymically. In this sense, the storm could be construed as a metaphoric euphemism, if we understand the storm as a symbol for the turbulent experience of being a traitor.

233 But we would have to disregard almost everything else that is happening around

Gloucester if we were to read the storm as only a symbol and not also a physical feature of the night’s events. This is not to mention the fact that the storm’s material presence is what brings the conflict between Gloucester and Cornwall to light in the first place:

Gloucester reveals his political sympathies because Lear is outdoors, in the night and exposed to a storm.

Although Gloucester is tersely warned not to assist the beleaguered king, his sympathies trump Cornwall’s threat. In 3.3, a short but important scene, Gloucester reveals his plan to go out into the storm and assist Lear. He tells Edmund that he has decided to sneak out in the storm in order to rescue:

Alack, alack, Edmund, I like not this unnatural dealing. When I desired their leave that I may pity him they took from me the use of mine own house; charged me on pain of perpetual displeasure neither to speak of him, entreat for him, or any way sustain him … If he ask for me, I am ill and gone to bed. If I die for it – as no less is threatened me – the king my old master must be relieved (3.3.1- 6…16-19).

These lines are important not only because they reveal Gloucester’s plan to go out in the storm, but also because he does not yet know that Edmund is plotting against him, and it is his erroneous trust in Edmund that leads to his downfall. Despite mistaking Edmund’s loyalty, Gloucester is quite aware of the political stakes of his actions with regards to the king (‘If I die for it’ [3.3.17]). He asks Edmund to protect him; but, of course, Edmund will report the deception directly to Cornwall. Gloucester’s revelation of the pragmatic task of trying to find the king and deliver him to shelter enables Edmund’s sabotage.

Crucially, it is only because of the storm that Gloucester is forced to reveal his sympathies in this way, and he does so because he is concerned for the king’s exposure to the elements. Thus, retrospectively, the storm is integral to Cornwall and Regan’s

234 arraigning of Gloucester in 3.7, because it is Lear’s exposure to the storm that provokes him to swiftly act upon his political loyalties.

As we know, Gloucester is the most superstitious character. His interest in the

‘late eclipses of the sun and moon’ (1.2.103) is established early in the play. Thus we would suspect that he would be the most likely to speculate on the portentous nature of the storm and contemplate what it might signify for him and the kingdom. But this apparently fundamental aspect of his character is complicated and challenged by Lear’s exposure to the storm. Indeed, his journey through the storm also reveals his cosmological worldview and vague astrological rhetoric as a symptom of a more specific belief in the status quo, legitimacy, hierarchy and law. When Gloucester describes

Lear’s situation in the storm as ‘unnatural’, this is not to do with the storm, nature or truth per se, but instead relates to Gloucester’s belief that Lear is king and, naturally, he should be sheltered.

When Gloucester finally finds Lear, he assumes that Lear would prefer to be inside and out of the storm. He explains that he has defied official orders to help him and get him shelter:

Though their injunction be to bar my doors And let this tyrannous night take hold upon you, Yet I have ventured to come seek you out, And bring you where both fire and food is ready (3.4.146-149).

Gloucester is not just acting sympathetically for a friend, but rather politically. He fully understands the political stakes of what he is doing, as revealed by his description of

Cornwall’s demand as an ‘injunction’. Although Gloucester imagines he has come to relieve the king from his unwitting exposure to the storm and to find Lear helpless and in desperate need to shelter, he finds quite the opposite. Lear wants to stay out in the storm:

‘First let me talk with this philosopher’ (3.4.150), Lear says to Gloucester before he

235 takes shelter. Lear wants to know the answer to a pressing question first: Lear then asks

Poor Tom ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ (3.4.151).

Gloucester’s concern for Lear is not a sign of his innate magnanimity; his sympathies are for the king’s exposure and nobody else’s. As mentioned in the last chapter, he is ashamed of Lear for the company he is now keeping. When he first encounters Lear with Poor Tom, he dismissively asks Lear, ‘what, hath your grace had no better company?’ (3.4.138). He is not concerned for the fact that Poor Tom is also exposed because it does not have a bearing on his overarching goal. Of course, it is important to note that Gloucester actually dismisses his exiled son in disguise, ironically in keeping with a desire to assert ‘legitimate order’. Here Gloucester sees only Lear’s plight as related to the storm: Lear is a legitimate king and it is unnatural for him to be exposed to the storm like a lowly Bedlam beggar. To be a loyal subject means finding shelter for his king.

Gloucester and Cornwall’s euphemistic exchange at the end of 2.2 and

Gloucester’s disregard of Cornwall and Regan’s injunction because of his desire to shelter Lear leads to Gloucester’s blinding. One of the most callous and memorably violent events in Shakespeare’s oeuvre is literally brought about by Gloucester’s urgent, ostensibly pragmatic, quest to find shelter for the king. When Gloucester is tied up, just before he is blinded, Regan and Cornwall interrogate him about his pursuit of the King in the storm. In his interrogation Gloucester reveals his personal and political positions on this situation. Gloucester encourages Lear to go to Dover because Cordelia has returned and he knows Lear will find shelter with her. When Gloucester is asked why he pursued the king, he uses his first response to express his contempt for the daughters’ ingratitude: ‘Because I would not see thy cruel nails / Pluck out his poor old eyes; nor thy fierce sister / In his anointed flesh stick boarish fangs.’ (3.7.55-57). But the second

236 reason Gloucester states for sending Lear to Dover is because the French have arrived to fight back and reclaim the throne from these so-called illegitimate rulers. He sends Lear to Dover because ‘The sea, with such a storm as his bare head / In hell-black night endured, would have buoyed up / And quenched the stelled fires … / I shall see / The winged vengeance o’ertake such children’ (3.7.58-65). Here the storm is drawn into another metonymic euphemism. This time the stormy euphemism is an aspect of a future perfect cosmological revenge metaphor: ‘The sea’ will quench ‘the stelled fires’ implies that France will defeat the illegitimate rule in Britain. Crucially, even within

Gloucester’s future perfect metaphoric revenge fantasy, the storm remains material and, as such, metonymic: the sea will put out whatever cosmic powers allowed Lear to endure such an horrific storm, even if Lear himself did not want shelter. For Gloucester, the very fact of Lear’s exposure represents the illegitimacy of the offenders’ rule.

Gloucester’s eyes are pulled out during the next line: ‘see’t shalt thou never’ (3.7.66).

He will never see the world returned to the legitimate order he desires.

The fact that Gloucester and all the other characters respond to the storm and act in relation to Lear’s exposure to the storm entangles the storm in the dramatic action and the wider political drama. While Gloucester expresses his sympathies for the king and acts on them, Cornwall shuts the door on Lear, thereby revealing his own political agenda. Gloucester’s deliberation on whether or not to go and assist the king means that

Edmund is privy to his final plan and can betray his father to Cornwall and Regan. All this political intrigue and game playing is primarily about the meaningful difference between being indoors and outdoors during the storm and could not have been revealed plausibly without the storm. Indeed, the characters’ sympathy, or lack thereof, for the king in the storm is the metonymic expression of each character’s personal and political sympathies with regard to the entire dramatic situation.

237 Ultimately, Gloucester’s journey through the storm is very different to Lear’s. It begins with a tense exchange with Cornwall at the very end of 2.2 and ends with his blinding in 3.7. His main motivation during the storm is to find shelter for the king. By contrast the king pursues both the assistance and meaning of the storm. Lear’s initial cries to the storm begin with him conjuring it (‘Blow winds, and crack your cheeks’

[3.2.1]) and end, only twenty lines later, with his announcement that he is enslaved by the storm (‘Here I stand your slave’ [3.2.19]). Lear then goes about transforming himself in the face of the storm’s indifference, remaining exposed until he is convinced he understands the relationship between the storm and his situation. But Gloucester does not seek to read the storm as a sign of anything. Rather, he fixates on the injustice of Lear’s exposure to it. Gloucester and Lear’s journeys are seemingly parallel, and although by the fourth act they end up on the same beach, in a similarly grim state, their experiences in the storm are very different. Lear’s journey propels him to strip off his clothes in pursuit of a shameless utopian ideal that does not exist in the world as it is, while Gloucester actively works to return the world to what it was and has his eyes gouged out. As such, Gloucester, perhaps more than any other character, is confronted with the political stakes of his actions during the storm and the brute political reality of the wider dramatic situation. The next section aims to discuss the storm as a trigger for a

‘natural disaster’ not only in relation to Gloucester and Lear, but for the kingdom as a whole.

5.4. A Natural Disaster in the Kingdom

This section views the storm as a trigger of ‘natural disaster’ and what unfolds afterwards as akin to a natural disaster. In keeping with the UN definition of a natural disaster that is quoted earlier in this chapter, I define ‘natural disaster’ as both a

238 hazardous physical event and the broad social and political consequences of its aftermath. What will unfold below is a demonstration of how the storm alters the plot of

King Lear by means of its interaction with the vulnerable kingdom and troubled king, and reveals how this causes adverse effects that require immediate responses. As Sun observed, ‘the heath serves as a watershed to the extent that the play begins thereafter to transform itself22‘; this transformation is produced by the characters’ need to sideline any other activities in order to immediately support Lear in the storm. These actions, propelled by the storm’s material force, reveal the extent to which the storm is involved in the story, which in turn exposes the storm as integral to Shakespeare’s re-shaping of the dramatic narrative.

The storm could not catalyse a disaster were the kingdom not already politically unstable: as the UN declared, a ‘natural disaster’ is catalysed by a ‘hazardous physical event interacting with vulnerable social conditions’.23 The vulnerability of the kingdom stems from its division in 1.1 because alongside his stripping naked in the storm, Lear’s division of the kingdom is one of the most politically transgressive acts in the play. A king’s rule of a kingdom is established upon several constitutive principles, two of which Lear utterly transgresses in the division of the kingdom. First, the king is given the power to make the rules, but also to make exceptions to the rules: as Carl Schmitt succinctly declares, ‘sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception’.24 A king can decide when to make exceptions to any rule at any point by imprisoning, releasing, executing, banishing or repatriating his subjects at will. In the division of the kingdom,

Lear uses his powers to utterly redefine what is included in and excepted from the kingdom.

22 Sun, Succeeding King Lear, p.36 23 Barros et al., Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation, p.31. 24 Schmitt in G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, D. Heller-Roazen (trans.), Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998, p.11. 239 Not only does he redraw all the borders and banish Cordelia and Kent, but Lear also uses his powers to essentially banish himself from the kingdom. By splitting the role of the king (‘The name, and all th’addition to a king’ [1.1.137]) from his responsibilities to the kingdom (‘the sway, / Revenue, execution of the rest’ [1.1.137-

138]) Lear essentially disempowers himself and gives himself no clear place within the kingdom. He becomes an itinerant king moving between his daughters’ castles. Thus in one action Lear goes from being the embodiment of sovereign authority with the absolute power to make exceptions to any rule to being excluded from the very kingdom he once ruled with very little obvious claim to power.

The second principle that Lear transgresses is that of the ‘king’s two bodies’, presented in the previous chapter as the idea that the king assumes the position of immortal authority despite his mortality. In banishing himself Lear undermines the authority given to a king by his ‘two bodies’. But the king derives his authority from the immortal kingdom or ‘the body politic’. Thus by separating himself from the kingdom the king loses that authority. Emily Sun puts it this way:

King Lear stages a crisis of sovereignty that ensues from (Lear’s) decision to violate the indivisibility of the king’s two bodies – the body politic and the body natural – prior to his physical demise.25

After the division, Albany and Cornwall assume control of the ‘body politic’, while

Lear has retained the title of the king and represents the ‘body natural’. In the storm,

Lear fully reveals to us what a king’s ‘body natural’ looks like without the resources of the ‘body politic’: the king is nothing more than a ‘poor, bare, forked animal’ (3.4.106-

107). But the ‘body politic’ is similarly exposed and vulnerable during the storm.

After Lear uses his power to banish himself as king from the kingdom, and therefore divide the king’s two bodies, it becomes profoundly unclear who holds power,

25 Sun, Succeeding King Lear, p.2. 240 who should hold power, who desires power and who will eventually wield power on behalf of the ‘body politic’. Lear poses a real problem for everyone affected by his decisions – everyone in the kingdom – because at the same time as dividing the ground upon which his authority is built, by not handing over the title of the king, Lear gives no one a clear mandate to govern. Moreover, the reason the storm catalyses a disaster is not just because Lear is personally volatile, but when the storm strikes, the kingdom is politically vulnerable because there is an unresolved conflict to determine who really holds power in the wake of the division of the kingdom. Until the storm each character has an opinion on the situation, but no one really acts upon their opinion. Lear certainly believes he can do whatever he likes as though he was still in charge of the kingdom, and Gloucester and Kent support this view. The Fool lampoons him for his stupidity, but ultimately supports his master. Albany is content to manage the affairs of his portion of the kingdom and not to get involved in any conflict about who has ultimate authority. Goneril is concerned that the riotous knights of Lear’s train will bring disgrace upon the court and undermine their new authority. Cornwall and Regan are similarly concerned that rogues, like Kent, will undermine their new rule. Edmund is keen to capitalise on the instability in order to claim power for bastards. Cordelia is banished and, as such, has little to do with the initial power struggle, and Edgar absents himself from the whole affair.

The fact that Kent, Gloucester and Albany are happy to support the king in spite of his clinging to the entourage and Goneril, Regan and Cornwall are not produces a split between the two new authorities: Albany and Cornwall. This tension politically splits the geographically divided kingdom. When it comes to the storm then, the fact that

Goneril, Regan and Cornwall unilaterally refuse Lear a lodging with the entourage of knights and that Lear refuses to relinquish the knights at precisely the same time, brings

241 to a climax the conflict regarding who has the right to govern the kingdom and the means by which they should govern, given the indeterminate status of the king. While

Albany is content to just let Lear do what he likes in order to avoid conflict, for Goneril,

Regan and Cornwall the knights represent the displaced authority of the king. Their attempts to pry Lear away from the entourage is, on the one hand, a pitiless and mean attempt to restore order to the court, but, on the other hand, it is also their attempt at taking the authority that Lear has refused to fully relinquish.

Due to the volatile political situation and the kingdom’s total instability, the position a character holds with regards to Lear’s exposure to the storm is necessarily political. Firstly, conflict that develops out of tensions between Albany and Cornwall that are explicitly about their treatment of the king in the storm. As mentioned above,

Cornwall has no sympathy for Lear: he views Lear as unreasonable and having brought the situation upon himself. Albany, who had remained largely impartial in the fight between Lear and his daughters, finally positions himself squarely against Cornwall, sympathising with Lear in the storm and, as such, overtly aligns himself with the king after the storm. Albany blames Regan, Goneril, Cornwall and Edmund for the king’s exposure to the storm and he reads Lear’s exposure as a sign that they are not fit to govern. Lear’s exposure supplies Albany with a reason to go to war. Albany’s declaration of war comes after the storm and after he hears about Gloucester losing his eyes for being loyal to the king in the storm: ‘Gloucester, I live / To thank thee for the love thou showd’st the King / And to revenge thine eyes. Come hither, friend, / Tell me what more thou knowest’ (4.4.95-98). Albany declares war because Gloucester showed love for Lear in the storm. Regan and Goneril, at this point seduced by Edmund, hold the antagonistic line and commit to fighting for their half of the kingdom. As such, it is

242 possible to claim that the civil war develops out of the display of loyalties produced by the characters either ignoring or assisting the king in the storm.

Furthermore, the French army is deployed in order to rescue Lear specifically because he is out in the storm. The situation is so grave that external emergency support is also required. When a Gentleman delivers word to Cordelia of Lear’s exposure, her response is to exclaim how wretched it is that they let him go out in the storm in the night: ‘Sisters, sisters, shame of ladies, sisters! / Kent, father, sisters! What, i'the storm, i'the night? / Let pity not be believed!’ (4.4.28-30). In this instance, their lack of sympathy for Lear’s exposure to the storm is also as a synecdoche for the unjust nature of their rule. Cordelia returns to England with the French army because Lear was exposed to the storm. Lear’s exposure was a spectacular sign that Lear needed her assistance and catalysed the invasion of England by French forces.

To conclude this section, it is now possible to say that if were not for the storm there might not have been a war and the play might not have ended in complete destruction of the social order. The storm triggers a ‘natural disaster’ in the play because the instability in the kingdom is exacerbated by the storm’s force. Of course all the elements of the play are equally important, from Lear’s actions to the rest of the characters’ reactions, but the aim of this chapter was quite simply to understand the storm as a key agent within the progression of the story.

Indeed, King Lear is only like a natural disaster because, of course, it is a dramatic representation of a storm. Nevertheless, the actual natural disaster and the representation of the disaster are analogous. A ‘natural disaster’ changes historical narratives. For example, Hurricane Katrina has forever changed the history of New

Orleans. In comparison, a representation of a forceful and imposing natural event can be similarly used for the purposes of reshaping story. Indeed, Shakespeare arguably used

243 the extended storm in order to thoroughly rewrite the ending of the Lear legend, turning history to tragedy. As was indicated in Chapter One, in previous versions there is a falling out between Lear and his two elder daughters and Lear flees the country. But in the histories of Monmouth and Holinshed Lear successfully finds a safe haven with

Cordelia. In contrast Shakespeare’s version the storm comes just at the wrong time, provoking Lear to pause and consider ‘what is the cause of thunder?’ and provoking all the other characters to inadvertently display their political loyalties by trying to get him to take shelter. As such, although there are tensions between Albany and Cornwall, the storm and Lear’s exposure to it swiftly brings them to the fore. Likewise, although

France had been informed of Lear’s strife, their relief mission becomes an invasion due to old king’s exposure to the storm. Due to Lear’s persistent exposure and the instability in the kingdom brought about by Lear’s radical division of powers, the storm brought out the weaknesses of the kingdom and catalysed a natural disaster.

5.5. Conclusion

This chapter connected the meteorological storm to an analysis of King Lear as a socio-political drama and demonstrated the extent to which the physical storm is involved in that drama. Indeed, it was the argument of this chapter that the storm intersects with a kingdom destabilised by the division of the kingdom – exposed due to the erratic behaviour of the king, plagued by further divisions between Albany and

Cornwall and threatened by the imminent invasion from France – to produce a natural disaster. As such, the storm has an effect not only upon Lear but also upon the entire kingdom. The kingdom itself is not able to weather the storm and plummets swiftly into war.

244 The storm produces a ‘natural disaster’ because the storm provokes the characters to display their divergent political sympathies. This is because King Lear remains the nominal figurehead of the kingdom throughout and, as such, an expression of sympathy for Lear’s exposure to the storm is an expression of loyalty to his kingship.

Conversely, an expression of disloyalty to or disinterest in Lear’s exposure represents loyalty to another political order. As such, Gloucester’s downfall is caused by his desire to deliver Lear to shelter. Likewise, Lear’s exposure to the storm forces all the other characters to reveal their political loyalties as well, thereby exacerbating the political crisis in the kingdom. The crisis manifests in war. From this point of view, what unfolds in King Lear is a natural disaster: a violent meteorological event catalyses further devastation in an already vulnerable kingdom.

245

Conclusion

This thesis has offered the first sustained analysis of the storm in King Lear as a storm. That is, as a material meteorological event that, by virtue of its magnitude and duration, becomes physically involved in the human conflict. The thesis has asserted that the storm’s material entanglement lends the cataclysm deep historical, political and cosmological significance and opens up new ways of understanding the action of King

Lear. Such an argument contests the long-held critical assumption that the storm is a symbol for another aspect of the human drama.

In order to rethink Shakespeare’s most famous cataclysm the thesis was broken down into two parts. The first part provided a historical overview of the storm, from an elucidation of the storm’s significance in early seventeenth-century Europe and Britain, to an overview of the various ways artists have staged this storm throughout Western theatre history. The second section used psychological theory, political philosophy and literary close reading techniques to offer a new interpretation of the storm’s role within the drama, looking at the storm’s interaction with Lear and the other characters. This

Conclusion offers a review of the findings of the individual chapters, a discussion of the various critical and conceptual implications of the argument, and a proposal for the direction of future academic and theatre work – one that focuses on the links between meteorology, drama and politics.

246 The Study of the Storm in King Lear

Starting with the premise that the storm likely meant something very different in

1606 than it does today, the first chapter reanimated the storm’s early modern significance. When considered in relation to other dramatic meteorological events in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, King Lear’s storm is revealed as a radical dramatic event that subverted the early modern conventions for the theatrical representation of meteorological violence. Shakespeare broke with established dramatic tropes and created a storm the likes of which had not been seen on the early modern stage. Unlike the ‘Thunder and lightning’ in Shakespeare’s Macbeth or Marlowe’s Dr

Faustus, King Lear’s storm is unique because it has no connection with the demonic, divine or supernatural. Furthermore, unlike the stormy opening to The Tempest or the storms between scenes in Pericles, this idiosyncratic storm does not have a simple plot function. Instead, King Lear’s storm spans several scenes over two acts, remains utterly indifferent to the characters, provokes Lear to rethink his ontological status and precipitates the decline of a king and the ruination of the kingdom. Chapter One also argued that the material storm was one of the central innovations in Shakespeare’s adaptation of the old Lear legend. In all previous versions of the Lear story the tale ends happily with Lear’s restoration to the throne. With the exception of some ‘Thunder’ in the Anonymous King Leir (1605), the meteors do not feature in any previous versions of the story. Thus, in its early seventeenth-century context, Shakespeare used the storm to upset his audience’s expectations on several fronts by challenging both the conventional representation of storms and by harnessing the storm to overhaul the well- known trajectory of the Lear story.

This chapter also argued that the storm takes on further historical importance when viewed in relation to early modern cosmological ideas. Under the rubric of

247 geocentrism, the meteors were thought to have a direct connection with the heavens. As such, storms were literally imagined as either direct signs from God or the gods, or at the very least part of a coherent natural or divine order. But, by not adhering to the assumed correspondence between the heavens and the earth, this storm can be read as cosmologically ambiguous. Further, given the play’s first performance date (1606),

King Lear sits between the publication of Copernicus’s theory of heliocentrism (1543) and the cultural uptake of the new cosmology, which happened slowly and at times violently in Britain and Europe over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus the storm can be read as a cataclysm that begins thundering in a closed classical geocentric world and, by virtue of its ‘eyeless rage’, opens out into a decentred and infinite universe. So, although the storm has deep historical significance as an early seventeenth century cultural artefact, by virtue of its radical cosmic drama, King Lear is both classical and modern, projecting backward and forward in time, giving the story a timeless or ahistorical quality. This historical and cosmological ambiguity manifests in

Lear’s important question: ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ When viewed through an

Aristotelian lens, Lear can be understood as asking ‘what is the “final cause” or

“purpose” of the storm in the world’? Thus Shakespeare references an old tradition of philosophical speculation in the face of inexplicable and seemingly unjust meteorological violence. But, by virtue of the fact that the question remains unanswered in the drama, ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ also points forward to the godless modern cosmos where storms are thought to have no purpose at all.

Although the storm accrues such significance when viewed from a historical perspective, the storm is categorically not viewed in these terms today. Rather, its meaning is remade by way of its ongoing theatrical representation. Thus, in the next two

248 chapters the stage representation of the storm was explored in order to map its different interpretations and track the emergence of the idea of the storm as symbol.

Chapter Two argued that, from the early seventeenth through to the late nineteenth century, the main aesthetic ambition in British productions of the play was to represent a meteorological storm on stage. The creation of the storm was aided by incremental technological progress, which by the nineteenth century facilitated grand mechanised weather events on the stage. However, the meaning or purpose of this literal or pictorial storm was entirely dependent on the play text that was used in the production. From 1681 to 1838, Nahum Tate’s adaptation occupied the London stage.

In this period the purpose of the meteorological storm was neither to provide a challenge to the cosmological order nor to facilitate Lear’s tragic decline, but instead to provide an obstacle for the righteous to overcome in order to triumph once more. By the time King Lear was restored to the stage in the mid-nineteenth century, the radical cosmological and meteorological dimensions of the play were lost.

Chapter Three outlined the tendency of more experimental modern theatre practitioners to redesign the nature of the storm itself. Some early to mid-twentieth century productions of King Lear represented the storm as a symbol of chaos or of

Lear’s inner turmoil. In the select examples from England and Germany, the meteors themselves were marginalised. Critics also took up this interpretation, giving rise to the now ubiquitous understanding of the storm as a symbol. By way of a specific selection of examples from England, Australia, Germany and Iceland, the final part of Chapter

Three revealed a gradual return to the representation of a spectacular meteorological storm. But the conclusion of this chapter showed that despite some artists’ attempts to reintegrate the physical force of the storm itself into a production and reanimate its

249 cosmic and political significance, the dominant theatrical representation and critical understanding of the storm remain symbolic.

Part Two of the thesis supplied a critical reinterpretation of King Lear by analysing the human drama in relation to the meteorological storm’s ‘impetuous blasts’ and ‘eyeless rage’. Although the storm itself does not thunder with a clear purpose or intention – it makes ‘nothing of’ Lear – the characters are forced to respond to material imposition of the thunder, lightning, wind and rain. Moreover, the storm becomes meaningful by the way it compels the characters to respond to its presence and, as such, alters the characters’ actions and guides their intentions.

Chapter Four undertook a close reading and reinterpretation of Lear’s famous journey through the storm. This chapter was guided by the hypothesis that when the storm is considered as a physical force, the reader’s understanding of the drama changes. Firstly, Lear’s journey through and relationship with the storm takes on new significance. A focus on the relation of a material storm to a human body reveals Lear struggling with shame around his body and its mortality. While understanding Lear as ashamed was not a new observation, through facing Lear’s and our own shame in relation to this issue, we come to see Lear’s journey in the storm in a new light: he is not mad simply because of grief or infirmity, but rather because he is trapped in a maddening struggle with shame around his bodily weakness. Lear wants to

‘Unburdened crawl toward death’, but he wants to do so with the comforts of a supposedly immortal king. Lear’s refusal to let go of his desire leads him out into the storm. Once out in the storm he appears to be mad – to the other characters as well as the audience – because he is more interested in ‘the cause of thunder’ than in taking shelter. This chapter argued that the storm’s materiality and utter indifference to his desires provokes Lear to shamelessly reveal himself as mortal and reconsider his own

250 relationship to the world. Although this chapter is largely about Lear’s own transformation in the storm, rather than the storm itself, the brute materiality of the storm and Lear’s physical body in relation to it produces a new understanding of the role of the storm in Lear’s tragic downfall.

Chapter Five demonstrated how the storm’s force within the drama has a material impact on other characters as well, and how it consequently catalyses the broader political catastrophe in the kingdom. The concept of ‘natural disaster’ as occurring at the intersection between a disastrous physical event and human systems enabled a framing of the storm as a force within the political drama. In this final chapter the extent of the social and political significance of the material meteorological storm was revealed. Here it was shown that the storm’s presence in the politically unstable kingdom catalyses the disaster. While Lear desires to ‘Unburdened crawl toward death’ and is partially remade by his exposure to the storm, the rest of the kingdom is entirely undone by the storm. The storm forces all the characters to take sides in the political conflict, dividing them into factions that support Lear and factions that do not. It is the characters’ expression of sympathy with or indifference to Lear’s exposure to the storm that triggers the full-scale political conflict that unfolds in the final two acts. This chapter proposed that without the storm there might have been no reason for such an unequivocal display of political loyalties. For example, ‘the face’ of the divisions between Albany and Cornwall that Kent describes as ‘covered’ (3.1.20) in 3.1 might well have remained so. Without the storm, Lear would eventually have died, but the kingdom itself may have avoided utter ruin.

251 A New Vision for King Lear

The storm in King Lear is one of the most famous meteorological events in the

Western dramatic canon. Rethinking this central event and reanimating its material agency within the story has several important critical and conceptual implications.

Firstly, the thesis challenged the authority of the ubiquitous interpretation of the storm as a metaphor for Lear’s mind or symbol of political chaos by understanding the storm as a physical presence and material force within the drama, and by arguing that the storm itself provokes Lear to unashamedly reveal himself as mortal. This revelation catalyses the other characters to declare their political loyalties, which is central to the denouement of the civil war. In this respect, the thesis offers a new interpretation of this old play and invites other Shakespeare scholars to rethink other aspects of the play in relation to the storm. In the past the storm as served as a metaphorical pillar in many critical arguments about King Lear, thus it follows that those arguments will need to be revised if the base material structure of that pillar has changed.

The second implication of the research is that it reveals the storm itself as an important site for the remaking of meaning in King Lear. This claim builds upon the theses of Maynard Mack and R.A. Foakes who argue that King Lear is remade in a particularly profound way by each generation. In King Lear in Our Time, Mack states that ‘each exploration (of King Lear) is also an exploration of ourselves’.1 For Mack,

‘the abysses of the play are in fact wrapped in an enigma of our own ignorance of the meaning of existence, its peaks echo with cries of triumph and despair so equivocal that we are never sure they are not ours.’2 R.A. Foakes would probably agree: he argues that

‘King Lear is released from history, and can therefore always be seen as essentially a

1 M. Mack, King Lear in Our Time, Methuen, London, 1966, p.83. 2 R.A. Foakes, Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p.181. 252 contemporary play.’3 For both scholars, King Lear can be remade in each historical moment not because of a thematic timelessness, but because the very territory on which the drama unfolds is enigmatic and ahistorical. Although in Chapter One I argued that the storm had quite a specifically meaningful function in its early seventeenth century context, the play begins thundering in a closed Classical cosmos and opens out into an indeterminate modern cosmos. This ‘opening out’ of the cosmic frame gives the play its sense of timelessness. Through this thesis I propose that the main ‘mysterious’ instability in King Lear is the storm itself: the storm is a wild and erratic non-human force that messes up the human order and enables King Lear to be remade in each generation.

By extension, the third implication of the research is that by claiming agency for the storm itself, the critical tendency to think about Lear’s encounter with the storm in a symbolic sense is revealed as a particular and historically contingent understanding of man’s perceived relationship with the natural world. It follows that an overview of different ways King Lear has been remade, reinterpreted and, at times, rewritten, by each generation in relation to the storm doubles as a snapshot of modern, Western man’s perceived relation to the brute materiality of the natural world. In each age the storm plays an important role in our understanding of King Lear, but the meaning of that relationship is not static across time.

It was argued in Chapter One that Shakespeare’s reworking of the old story creates a drama about the changing relationship between the heavens, sovereign authority and the human during a time of cosmological upheaval. In the seventeenth century, Lear’s relationship with the storm arguably reflects the contemporary crisis of knowledge about the relationship between man and nature. As such, Lear in the storm

3 Ibid. 253 can be seen as a dramatic meditation on the uncertainty regarding man’s relation to nature that was rife in England and Europe: this worldview was instigated by the

Reformation, exacerbated by Copernican Cosmology and finally remade during

Scientific Revolution. In the late seventeenth century, Tate adapted King Lear to represent the triumph of legitimate moral order and to celebrate love, truth and virtue.

Lear triumphed over the storm; he was not remade in the storm’s image. This incarnation of King Lear casts man’s relationship to nature as one of mastery over nature, which reflects both the Restoration promise of the legitimacy and superiority of the Monarchy, as well as the Enlightenment ideal of man’s capacity to conquer nature.

By the time Macready finally restored the play to the stage, it is not man’s relation to external nature that is explored in the storm, but rather man’s relationship to his own ‘nature’ that takes centre stage. By the mid-nineteenth century Lear’s cosmological conundrum had lost its currency and, stemming from Tate’s interpretation, Lear is cast as a heroic patriarch with whose plight we must sympathise.

At the same time critics like Lamb and Hazlitt complained that the spectacle of the staged storm distracted the viewer from understanding Lear’s internal nature. This problem was addressed in the first half of the twentieth century, when the internal machinations of Lear were spectacularised on stage. The storm was turned into a symbol for Lear’s mind both on stage and in criticism. So, by the mid-twentieth century, man’s complex and counter-intuitive ‘nature’, not the brute material indifference of the natural world, was the most meaningful aspect of the scenes. Man’s relationship with his own nature became the source of theatrical and critical interest.

The play was radically reinvented during the Cold War as a social drama. In this instance man’s relationship with the heartless ‘nature’ of the political apparatuses was theatricalised. In this time a thoroughly different temperament for the eponymous

254 character was envisioned: Lear was dark, violent and brooding. Royal grandeur was stripped out of the play and Jan Kott argued that, in the 1960s, the ‘most contemporary aspect of King Lear … is the fool who deprives majesty of its sacredness’.4 The storm did not factor as an especially significant aspect of the play throughout this period: the external world was not ‘nature’ but the bleak, grey halls of the political apparatus. In contrast, many recent productions of King Lear have emphasised the storm itself, thereby reanimating the force of non-human natural agency within the play and provoking us to rethink the relationship between humans, human political constructs and nature. Thus, the King Lear of our time – the version this thesis has worked to reveal – is a play about the power of the storm over the desires of individual humans and the perceived immutability of political apparatuses. Expensive cosmological and meteorological spectacles, the likes of which had not been seen on the stage since the late nineteenth century, have been constructed on stages around over the world in

London, Frankfurt, Reykjavik and Sydney. This return to an emphasis on the storm itself – on its cruel indifference, no less – captures the Zeitgeist: a well-founded and ever-increasing anxiety about the power of the natural world over humans.

The fourth implication of this study is that the complete chaos of the storm scenes, from the chaos in the kingdom to Lear’s shame-induced madness, can now also be seen as part of the political drama, rather than distinct from it. By closely focussing on the importance of the storm within the dramatic narrative, this thesis fully revealed how the storm and the action of the storm scenes are inherently part of the political drama. This is important because there is a tendency to see the action in the storm scenes as somehow outside the political drama that is unfolding, despite the fact that just prior to the storm scenes of Act Three we see an unequivocal display of political

4 J. Kott, ‘King Lear or Endgame’, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 2nd edn, Methuen, London, 1967; M. Mack, King Lear in Our Time, Methuen, London, 1966, p.130-131. 255 loyalties by virtue of the characters’ decisions to remain indoors or go outdoors. This thesis has demonstrated that Lear in the storm is a representation of the key aspect of the full-scale political tragedy that is unfolding in his name: Lear in the storm is what the king looks like when he is split off from the kingdom and banished from the court.

The fifth critical implication of the overall thesis is that it offers a new methodology for understanding the agency of the non-human within drama. Today much attention is being given to the role of nature and the non-human in humanist artistic forms, from those working on the general cultural history of the weather5 to those specifically working on ‘ecocritical Shakespeare’.6 This latter branch of

Shakespeare studies attends to the particular ecological or eco-political value of

Shakespeare’s work by drawing out what it can reveal to us about the nature of humans’ relationship with the environment. Indeed, in the introduction to Ecocritical

Shakespeare (2011) the editors go so far as to say that their kind of reading practice

‘may also carry a real benefit for the planet’.7 This thesis opted to privilege the particularities of the dramatic text before any specific historical, theoretical or political concern. The goal was not to excavate the storm’s agency in order to provide the reader with a moral imperative to act on climate change, as someone like Gabriel Egan has done. Instead the objective was to reveal the complexity of the text opened to us by an attention to forces beyond the human. Richard Madelaine once declared, ‘Variant

5 See for example, V. Jankovic, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650-1820, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2000; J. Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007; K. Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005; and G. Fine, Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Culture of Prediction, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007. 6 See for example the recent field-defining collection Ecocritical Shakespeare, edited by L. Bruckner and D. Brayton, Ashgate, London, 2011. 7 Ecocritical Shakespeare, p.9. 256 readings (of King Lear) confirm the richness, as well as the instability, of the text.’8

This thesis has argued that the storm is one of the key sources of King Lear’s richness and instability.

Towards Ecocritical Literary Historicism

The sustained analysis of the changing dramatic and literary representation of the human experience in relation to political systems, weather events and other agents in the non-human world offered here will be further developed in future work. This thesis has offered a method for historicising our relationship to the weather and rethinking the endemic misreading of the storm’s place within the drama. This strategy did not offer moral imperatives for how we should act to understand nature because of climate change, but instead worked to reveal the complexity and persistence of our misrecognition of our place in the world that underscores the human condition.

Studying the broad conceptual implications of such misrecognition, which for King

Lear is sustained by the desire for things to be otherwise, will form the basis of my future work.

The first part of this thesis was committed to defining and revising old assumptions. For although Robert Watson rightly argues that in King Lear all ‘human efforts to project our meanings onto the world melt away in indifferent rainstorms and bestial humanoids, as well as age and death,’9 we have repeated precisely that same pattern of projection throughout the theatrical and critical history of the play. As such, we cannot will away our penchant for misrecognising our relationship to the weather with a convincing alternative interpretation of the text alone. Rather, we need to

8 R. Madelaine, ‘As unstable as the King but never daft (?): Texts and variant readings of King Lear’, in Sydney Studies in English, Vol.28, 2002, (pp.1-17) p.17. 9 R. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2006, p.52. 257 interrogate the moral, political, social, historical, ideological, theological and cosmological assumptions that produce such misrecognition in the first place. Such a method is inspired by the work of Watson himself, as well as Craig Martin and

Alexandra Walsham, who approach rethinking human relations to non-human forces with a critical historical eye. Through revealing the changing significance of the storm over time, the first half of this thesis privileged the historical and cultural complexities of human relationships with the weather above a particular scientific truth, singular philosophical idea or intractable moral imperative.

But, when it comes to actually rethinking our relationship to the world itself, the model of close reading undertaken in Chapters Four and Five is closer to the kind of ecocritical textual analysis I believe must be undertaken in future. It is necessary to pursue a mode of scholarly enquiry that attends to the representation of troublesome and misguided human desires and negative and resistant emotions that prevent us from seeing, accepting and surrendering to the agency of the non-human world itself. Lear’s shame is arguably akin to the Western sense of entitlement over nature – the persistent and desirable, however tragically flawed, sense that it is all ours to take and manipulate, and the mad misconception that the storm is thundering on our behalf. Although he realises it far too late, what Lear comes to understand in the storm is that the thunder’s cause is not his own, nor is it his to behold.

258

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