Post2019
On Teaching Lear in a Time of Plague, Part 1
By Ann Pleiss Morris
Like many of us, today’s contributor, Ann Pleiss Morris (Ripon College), frequently teaches “outside her field.” Although her scholarship focuses on Early Modern drama, her courses cover a much broader field, including medieval literature and contemporary medievalisms. It should be no surprise that we have much to learn from her. Not only do many of us teach Shakespeare alongside our medieval offerings, but many Shakespeare plays form a powerful argument for the essential role of medievalism in English literature. We’re pleased to share her thoughts on teaching King Lear during a pandemic in two segments. Part 1 is below; part 2 will appear next week.
Part 2 can be found here.
The last time I taught class in person, it was Act 5 of King Lear. This particular class session is bleak under normal circumstances, but when I taught this desolate scene on March 11, 2020, the COVID-19 virus loomed on the horizon. My memory is fuzzy after eight months of quarantine, but I think, on that day, the students knew that spring break would be a week longer. After that? Well, we weren’t sure, but the possibility of us meeting in person again seemed unlikely. The bleakness of the play’s ending almost paled against the growing anxiety beginning to boil around us.
But, in the days and weeks that followed, Shakespeare and King Lear became the darling of social media. On March 13, 2020, Rosanne Cash tweeted, “Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of plague, he wrote King Lear.” There were a slew of memes that made this connection, mostly to the tune of “So what are you going do with your time? What great achievement will you produce?” I laugh now at the spunkiness of this line of thinking. Like we were all going to a two-week summer camp. Just think what we could achieve! Now, I sit among several months’ worth of craft cabin ruins, the results of homeschooling my elementary-aged children, wondering if I have done anything at all amidst the blur and hum of a life lived on Zoom.
The thing is, I do think Lear has something to teach us about living life during a plague, but I do not think it has anything to do with hyper-productivity. Instead, Lear teaches us that pandemic living requires one to endure ceaseless states of uncertainty. I recognized this lesson when I taught the play again in the fall of 2020, this time over Zoom to first year composition students.
Over the years, King Lear has become one of my favorite plays to teach. Not so much for the content of the play, but for the suite of in-class activities I have developed for it. Not all of these activities translated well to online learning, and my task was complicated by the exceptional quietness of my class. These were 2020 high school graduates now navigating this strange new world of online learning. I understood. I found myself lecturing a great deal just to fill the space of ever-expanding black boxes. And in that space of verbal ramblings, I found a deeper connection with the text and how it relates to our current socio-political moment.
I usually start Lear by reading the English folk tale “Cap O’Rushes,” a potential source for the play. I explain to the students that I will tell them a story, and they will tell me how it ends. In the tale, an old king makes his three daughters tell him how much they love him. After her siblings dutifully express their devotion to their father, the title character tells her father that she loves him “as meat loves salt.” The King rejects her and exiles her from his home. She dresses herself in rushes and finds employ in a nearby castle. The story that follows is Cinderella-esque. Cap O’Rushes sneaks into the local ball only to win the heart of her master’s son. When I reach this point in the story, I stop and ask the students how the story will end, attempting to show them that they already know that the couple will marry. They usually understand her father will pay in some way. In “Cap O’Rushes,” the girl’s father attends the wedding of the neighboring prince only to be served meat without salt. This meal helps him understand the depth of his estranged daughter’s love. At this point, Cap O’Rushes reveals herself and the reconciliation is complete. I explain to my students that they could predict the ending of this fairy tale, but that Shakespeare’s audience knew it. When the first audience of Lear saw that family drama play out on stage, it would have been immediately recognizable to them. They would have settled into their afternoon at the theater, confident that they knew how the story would end. Then Shakespeare spends the rest of the play defying those expectations. Semester after semester, I have explained that this ingenuity is the genius of the play, but I do not think I truly understood this genius until I sat in my guest bedroom, talking to a screen full of black boxes.
I stumbled upon this epiphany in Act 3, scene 6, when Glouchester, Lear, Kent/Caius, Edgar/Poor Tom, and the Fool gather in the hovel to wait out the storm. As my students and I sheltered in our own spaces that were “better than the open air” (3.6.1) of 2020, I saw our lives reflected back to us in this group of misfits. In the early modern theater, couplets often served as an aural punctuation mark at the end of a scene. So when Edgar is left alone on stage to close out the scene and starts speaking couplets, the early modern audience would have recognized the scene was winding down. But what is striking about this speech is that Edgar gives us not just one couplet but six:
When we our betters see bearing our woes,
We scarcely think our miseries our foes.
Who alone suffers suffers most i’ th’ mind,
Leaving free things and happy shows behind.
But then the mind much sufferance doth o’erskip
When grief hath mates and bearing fellowship.
How light and portable my pain seems now
When that which makes me bend makes the King bow!
He childed as I fathered. Tom, away.
Mark the high noises, and thyself bewray
When false opinion, whose wrong thoughts defile thee,
In thy just proof repeals and reconciles thee.
What will hap more tonight, safe ’scape the King!
Lurk, lurk. (3.6.92-105).
As the couplets’ powerful rhythm hits the ear repeatedly, Edgar’s speech builds and so does the audience’s anticipation. This anticipation falters in the penultimate couplet when the rhyme turns to repetition, an early signal that something is awry. And in the last “couplet” that Edgar offers, the poetry simply falls apart. All that buildup, but no resolution. Edgar gives his audience wise moral after wise moral—lessons from the suffering that has just played out in the hovel—but ultimately he leaves the audience completely unsatisfied. The sharp pull away from the established rhythm leaves the audience jarred. What Edgar does with this speech is a preview of what Shakespeare is about to do to his audience with the entire play as they move to the final scenes.
In “Cap O’ Rushes,'' there is a moment of reconciliation, and the daughter is given full agency when she reveals her identity to her father. Shakespeare’s first audiences likely thought they were getting that moment of redemption when Cordelia returns in Act 4. They were allowed, temporarily, to believe that the ending will be a happy one.
The end of Act 5, however, is anything but joyful. Shakespeare does not leave many stage directions, but there is one for the re-entry of Lear in Act 5, scene 3: “Enter Lear with Cordelia in his arms.” (5.3.253). The final image of the play is precise; the old, powerless king staggers out carrying the dead weight of his daughter. This is not the fairy tale the audience was expecting. And what follows is a series of moments in which Lear gives the audience hope that maybe a miraculous turn will take place, only to rob them of their expectations once again. His line “I know when one is dead and when one lives” (5.3.256) is the first of these. After all, Lear is completely unreliable. If he is telling the audience she is dead, he cannot be right. He asks for a looking glass and the audience knows he is looking for the mirror to do a breath test on the woman (5.3.256-258). Ah, ha!, says the audience, perhaps this is the moment where the story will turn. Kent, ever the chorus-like figure of the play, says “Is this the promised end?” (5.3.258). He echoes the audience, wishing for a redemptive moment. Edgar, however, knows that we cannot trust our expectations that everything will be okay: “Or image of that horror?,” (5.3.259) he responds. And certainly after everything he has been through in the last two acts, he knows that stories do not end happily.
When the mirror test does not work, Lear uses a feather to detect his daughter’s breath, another chance of the “promised end.” He exclaims, “She lives,” and the audience breaths a sigh of relief only to have it undercut when he says, “If that’s so / It is a chance which does redeem all sorrow.” With Kent, the audience must say, “Oh my good, Master,” and come to grips with the reality of the situation (5.3.260-263). Lear interrupts this acceptance yet again when, after begging her to “stay a little,” he exclaims, “Ha, /What is’t thou sayest? Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle, and low…” This is a tender, hopeful moment that Lear undercuts with his brutal admission, “--I killed the slave that was a-hanging thee” (5.3.267-270). Lear’s lament over Cordelia is interrupted by the news of his elder daughters and Edmund’s deaths. When Albany tries to assure the group that “All friends shall taste/ The wages of their virtue and all foes / The cup of their deservings. Oh, see, see!” It is Lear who responds simply, “And my poor fool is hanged. No, no life.” Cordelia is dead. Albany’s adage is merely the stuff of folk tales. Lear, amid the haze of his madness, suddenly sees clearly. In the Folio version of the play, Lear gives one final unresolved moment of hope: “Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,/ Look there, look there!” and before he can explain what he sees, he dies. The quarto version, written much closer to the time of the plague sustains Lear’s clarity of Cordelia’s death until the end. “And thou no breath at all? Oh, thou wilt come no more” he declares, before willingly himself to death “Break, heart, I prithee, break!”(5.3.303-307).
The audience will not get their anticipated happy ending. The old story of “Cap O’Rushes” cannot stand in the time of plague. Edgar and Kent switch places as the optimist. Edgar tries to coax the old man back, but Kent urges him, “Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass! He hates him / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer.” In this world of loss and unanticipated grief, happy endings are not appropriate or desired. One must wait amid suffering, never sure how the narrative will unravel itself, and for Lear, this ambiguity is unbearable.