Shakespeare was first, last, and always a man of the theatre. Throughout his works we find an awareness of and fascination with performance, with spectacle, with mimicry. Many of his most famous protagonists consciously reflect on themselves as actors. This tragedy begins with a failed piece of stagecraft: Lear has written the script and expects the actors (his daughters and the rest of the court) to play the parts he has prepared for them. Goneril, Regan, and almost everyone else play their roles, but Cordelia and Kent do not, and like a frustrated director he punishes them for it. Discuss this scene in this context. What is Shakespeare saying about performance, about ritual, about playing one’s part? Is Lear asking too much? Why does Cordelia refuse to say her lines? Where do your sympathies lie? Where would the sympathies of Shakespeare’s audience lie (and if you have read the ancillary materials, you know the composition of Shakespeare’s audience)?
In Edmund, Shakespeare creates one of his most memorable villains, and like all great villains, he is not entirely unsympathetic, or even wrong in his reasoning once we make the metaphysical assumptions he makes. Examine his first soliloquy and consider what he means when he talks about Nature, because on that word the entire play depends. Note that Lear uses the same word three times in the first scene, though clearly he and Edmund define the word differently. Indeed, the most disturbing aspect of King Lear may be the possibility that Edmund’s understanding of the word is truer than anyone else’s.
Plays are not intended to be read; they are intended to be watched. Shakespeare’s works are no exception. In fact, one problem with the way Shakespeare’s plays are taught is that their being plays is too often ignored. Here are four cardinal rules of playwriting:
1) No scene should exist merely for the purpose of exposition (giving the audience background information) because that would bring the dramatic momentum of the play to a halt. Every scene must advance the plot.
2) Audiences get frustrated if they have trouble identifying or distinguishing between characters, so the playwright needs to make any important character do something representative of his or her nature fairly soon after his or her appearance on stage.
3) The major themes of a play should be introduced in the first act — not necessarily in an explicit way, but the playwright must plant the seeds in the audience’s mind.
4) Because a playwright’s success depends upon the box office, one cannot assume that every member of the audience is particularly observant, and therefore the playwright must take care to show the audience any particularly important theme multiple times.
Now, consider how any of these practical rules of the theatre manifests itself in King Lear.