SHAKSPER 2002: Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@shaksper.net)
Date: 12/17/02
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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.2424 Tuesday, 17 December 2002
[1] From: Sean Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2002 13:52:09 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 13.2412 Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
[2] From: John W. Kennedy <jwkenne@attglobal.net>
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2002 11:00:22 -0500
Subj: Re: SHK 13.2412 Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
[3] From: Tom Hodges <hodges-te@actx.edu>
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2002 13:38:42 -0600
Subj: SHK 13.2412 Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
[4] From: W. L. Godshalk <godshawl@email.uc.edu>
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2002 17:04:49 -0500
Subj: Re: SHK 13.2412 Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
[5] From: Dale Lyles <DaleLyles@aol.com>
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2002 21:19:50 EST
Subj: Re: SHK 13.2412 Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
[6] From: Matthew Baynham <m.f.baynham@bgc.ac.uk>
Date: Friday, 13 Dec 2002 10:19:57 -0000
Subj: Cordelia
[7] From: Carol Barton <cbartonphd@earthlink.net>
Date: Friday, 13 Dec 2002 11:48:31 -0500
Subj: Re: SHK 13.2412 Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Sean Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2002 13:52:09 -0400
Subject: 13.2412 Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
Comment: Re: SHK 13.2412 Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
Terence offers the following as a counter-example to character
criticism:
>But in so far as division, the deliberate subversion of 'nationhood' by
>the regular imposition of crass partitions crudely sketched on maps, has
>become a central aspect of the alienating politics of our time, then the
>play addresses our world in deeply discomfortable terms each time the
>character called Lear utters those lines.
But he *does* utter those lines. Their importance, indeed their very
meaning, can be read only within the context of a certain character and
his needs or aspirations. Why does the character Lear see the state as
divisible, especially when other characters, products of the same
historical society and inhabitants of the same fictional world, do not?
What makes him determined to see the state as a personal possession?
Could this be related to his determination to treat love also as a
possession? Could whatever insight an answer might provide into property
and possession, into how even the most abstract function of knowledge
and appropriation starts in the grasp, also have importance for current
political events? Could it have importance even without being granted
meaning by a more or less liturgical gesture towards current political
events? Could it even say something about our being-in-the-world, or
our responsibility to one another, which would be true regardless of
political context?
Moreover, it is not in the least bit clear what the "play" is saying
which is so discomfiting. That all divisions are arbitrary (in which
case, there's no reason not to draw new ones wherever we fancy)? That
nations are indivisible (in which case, all separatist movements must be
ruthlessly stamped out)? Your reading seems to reduce the play to
something trotted out as a false analogy on a political talk-show, which
is, I suppose, better than Jerry Springer. Or, I suppose, it just
peters out in vagueness and cliché.
David Schalkwyk writes,
>Terry is merely reminding us that there are more ways of reading a play
>than by focussing on the expression of character. But we've all known
>this for a very long time.
Frankly, I don't get that impression at all. Nobody would try to add
his voice to a conversation by making dismissive comments about it. Or
at least, nobody should, since it seems like bad faith, though somebody
might call it irony.
Yours,
Sean.
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: John W. Kennedy <jwkenne@attglobal.net>
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2002 11:00:22 -0500
Subject: 13.2412 Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
Comment: Re: SHK 13.2412 Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
Don Bloom <dbloom@asms.net> writes,
>Good directors, I submit, start with that. They know that they can have
>an audience of highly educated, highly sophisticated New Yorkers or
>Londoners bawling their eyes out if they can stage that last scene right
>-- even though the audience knows what's going to happen! But to get
>that response every scene, every character, every line has to work
>toward that supreme moment, or else it will be weakened, even destroyed.
I can testify from personal experience that it also works when cut to 90
minutes and performed by a cast of amateurs in the open air at a
Renaissance faire. But you have to believe in the play.
You also have to believe that William Shakespeare was a man, not an
oracle.
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Tom Hodges <hodges-te@actx.edu>
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2002 13:38:42 -0600
Subject: Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
Comment: SHK 13.2412 Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
Has anyone seen or read about a KL production in which Lear delivers his
"Nothing will come of nothing" as a pun on the second nothing"
(no-thing)? I would appreciate instruction on this approach; at the
moment, this rendering seems "authentic" for several reasons.
1. Five nothings in four lines invite wordplay.
2. "Thing" versus "no thing" was common bawdry in 1600.
3. The pun echoes Kent and Gloucester's earlier "conceive ...good sport"
lines.
4. During G & R's fawning speeches, Lear preens, and his dutiful court
smile and murmur approvingly. It is his crowd, his little show, and he
is in control. But Cordelia's first "nothing" leaves Lear and his court
with their smiles drying on their teeth. By the time of her second
"nothing," she provokes sidelong glances and mutterings among the court;
so Lear jokes broadly with the crowd, reasserting control and briefly
reimposing a celebratory tone on this "retirement party about to go
bad." (I wonder who said that besides former colleague Scott Foll?)
Then Lear's "How, how, Cordelia! mend your speech a little . . . ." can
be intimate, even a bit pleading as he senses the impending fiasco.
5. In the opening scene many productions of KL shift him too quickly, it
seems to me, into angry tyrant. The weak no-thing jest provides the kind
of surprise, nuance, and variation typical of Shakespeare's stagecraft,
fleshing out Lear's character beyond Dotty Old Doofus.
OK, OK, I may be spinning cobwebs here. Earlier in this thread someone
reminded us that in talking about Shakespeare we are likely to be
wrong. I would add that some of us are more, and others of us most,
likely. From the ranks of the most likely wrong, holiday greetings.
Tom Hodges
[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: W. L. Godshalk <godshawl@email.uc.edu>
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2002 17:04:49 -0500
Subject: 13.2412 Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
Comment: Re: SHK 13.2412 Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
T. Hawkes reminds us, as L. C. Knights did many years ago, that
"character" is only one part of a playscript:
>Is it really necessary to point out that a good deal of 'King Lear' is
>concerned precisely to demonstrate, and deplore, the inadequacies of
>speech? And would anyone deny that all plays characteristically employ a
>complex array of non-discursive modes operating well beyond the confines
>of the words that individual characters utter? In King Lear,
>sound-effects, dress, song, music, gesture and --since we're concerned
>with Cordelia--silence, are all examples of that.
He continues:
>To reduce the play to what its characters say seems to me wilfully to
>ignore the dimensions from which most of its resonance derives.
I agree, and will add only one reminder: characters (i.e. dramatic
persons) don't "say" anything. As I hinted in my earlier posting, actors
speak (and interpret) the words in a script. And we can say that
readers of scripts do the same. But as Terry doesn't say (but appears to
mean), words in a script do not interpret themselves. When we say that
characters in a script "say" things, we are only pretending.
Yours, Bill Godshalk
[5]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Dale Lyles <DaleLyles@aol.com>
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2002 21:19:50 EST
Subject: 13.2412 Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
Comment: Re: SHK 13.2412 Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
Thanks to all who have jumped in to discuss Terence's koan. My
assumption was that he meant something pretty much as he himself
responded--patterns, nonverbal etceteras, etc.--but it was good to hear
some discussion of the point.
Another question, then: I myself do not hold with the idea of
character-as-persona as the basis for analyzing a play, but must we not
begin with the *text*? Yes, the silences, the gestures, the
extratheatrical/metatheatrical stuff are what go into making a play
"say" anything at all, but do they not all spring from the text? The
silences do not happen by themselves--nothing will come of nothing, as
the old man so petulantly says.
So when I asked about "the characters," I fear I was muddying the
waters--I meant "the text," and though it is made up of almost nothing
but what the characters say, isn't that what we must rely on?
By the way, I was sincere in my query of Terence. You may occasionally
suspect me of being socratically arch, but I do not approve of attacking
others online. It is simply bad form.
Dale Lyles
Newnan Community Theatre Company
http://newnantheatre.com
[6]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Matthew Baynham <m.f.baynham@bgc.ac.uk>
Date: Friday, 13 Dec 2002 10:19:57 -0000
Subject: Cordelia
I agree with Terence Hawkes much more than I agree with most of his
interlocutors: in particular on the specific point that Cordelia's
attempt at silence is just one end of a spectrum of good people's
ineffective speech which includes Lear's curses, Edgar's raving, Kent's
bluntness, the Fool's wit and is contrasted bitterly with the laconic
effectiveness, for most of the play, of bad people who for the most part
simply 'do something, and i'th'heat.'
But Professor Hawkes takes two further steps which seem to me much more
problematic. First, I really do think that discussion of the Palestine
problem is a bit far-fetched in the context of a discussion of King
Lear. And I do not know why we would think that literary scholars would
have any particular expertise to offer in this regard. For example,
Professor Hawkes: 'No one with any sense of the nature of the tragedies
currently engulfing Ireland, or Israel, can be unaware of...' must mean
'No one who agrees with me about the nature of the...' since it is quite
apparent that there is huge disagreement about the nature of both those
problems amongst thinking people.
This is not to deny that there might be proper political readings of
King Lear or other works, but only to suggest, I suppose, more
moderation in their claims.
Secondly, while I agree with Professor Hawkes that the recent list
discussion of Cordelia's motives was futile, I do not see why political
readings of the play need to exclude consideration of character and
motive. I still don't understand how modern theory can argue so strongly
for transhistorical expressions of power relations (so that King Lear
can tell you about the Palestine problem, for example) and yet deny the
transhistoricity of human nature. It seems to me that we can generalise
transhistorically about power relations only because we can generalise
transhistorically about what human beings are like.
Matthew Baynham
[7]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Carol Barton <cbartonphd@earthlink.net>
Date: Friday, 13 Dec 2002 11:48:31 -0500
Subject: 13.2412 Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
Comment: Re: SHK 13.2412 Re: Cordelia and Listening to the Play
Of course the play "says" something---my original point was, I believe,
that it "says" a great deal, about natural and unnatural love, as well
as "natural" vs. socialized man, and natural and unnatural fathers and
children, in addition to its commentary on crowns divided and abuse of
power and hypocrisy. I would not disagree with the redoubtable Handsaw
in that respect----and quite right, he is, to point out the political
relevance to the modern world. But the play is also about families
divided, about what separates loving child from loving father, and a
warning to those who (like the throned king) lend their ears to false
flatterers---James also portioned out his exchequer and ultimately his
royal power to Steenie and little Chuck (with disastrous results), even
if he did not do so as dramatically or pointedly as Lear.
I therefore most emphatically disagree with Prof. Hawkes that those who
attempt to understand what motivates the actions of the characters in
any Shakespeare play are reducing the Bard to Jerry Springer: precisely
what makes those plays so enduring is that these are not the
two-dimensional creatures of the morality play, nor the semi-allegorical
stick figures of the fairy tale, but real, living, breathing, conflicted
and conflicting human beings who shock us with their similarity to
people 400 years their (supposed) "betters"---because more technically
advanced, more thoroughly and broadly educated, and more morally and
psychologically evolved---we suppose. Falstaff is a caricature, but he
lives and breathes and walks (and rants) in almost every town in every
city all over the world, as surely in the 21st century as he did in the
seventeenth. So do Lear, and Edmund.
But Terry: you still have yet to enlighten us re: the absent Mrs.
Gloucester?
Best to all,
Carol Barton
_______________________________________________________________
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Hardy M. Cook, editor@shaksper.net
The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net>
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