Post2019
On Teaching Lear in a Time of Plague, Part 2
By Ann Pleiss Morris
Below you'll find the final segment of Ann Pleiss Morris's meditation on "On Teaching Lear in a Time of Plague." When many of us are finding the wait for "this" to resolve itself, it's good to be reminded what King Lear teaches us about happy endings.
Part 1 can be found here.
Even with Lear gone, Shakespeare does not miss the opportunity to deny his audience’s expectations one last time. At the close of the play, Kent gives us a couplet, “I have a journey, sir, shortly to go; / My master calls me. I must not say no.” This moment could end the play, but Edgar speaks: “The weight of this sad time we must obey, / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” This is another profound idiom. It has resonance with the play, but I would wager to guess that it also speaks to the audience of the play, living in the shadow of plague. But, true to form, Edgar does not stop there: “The oldest hath borne most; we that are young / Shall never see so much nor live so long.”[1] One last couplet, but at a slant. After another crescendo of couplets, the audience is left with imperfect resolution and a sense of uneasiness.
We don’t have reviews of Lear, but we do know that Restoration audiences rejected its ending. In 1681 Nathum Tate, rewrote the ending of the play. Tate’s version indulges the orderly aesthetics of his seventeenth-century audience, giving them the happy ending they expected—Lear lives, Cordelia lives, Edgar and Cordelia marry. This resolution has staying power and remains the ending of King Lear for more than 150 years before Shakespeare’s version is reclaimed.[2] I think this tells us that in a world with the memory of plague, people were not satisfied with Shakespeare’s ambiguous and grief-soaked ending. As a product of its social moment, Lear is a devastatingly human play of imperfect forgiveness and complicated grace. It was life as London knew it in that devastating year of 1606. It was truth for people who endured a devastating plague, an uncertain political transition, the potentially catastrophic violence of the gunpowder plot, and deep religious and political divisions throughout their county.[3] It was truth, but it was not comfortable. As the city and its culture moved away from the period of uncertainty and chaos, they wanted to forget. Tate came along and allowed audiences to divorce Lear from its precarious origins. And they did, for 150 years. And after this hiatus, Lear’s curse, “A plague upon your murderous traitors all!” was stripped of the intensity it must have had for those first audiences, becoming nothing more than a dated verbal spar. And we do not have to look far to realize how we, as humans, have turned a blind eye to plague stories throughout the ages. The powerful, uncontrolled nature of plagues scares us. Their uncertain origins and movements are unsettling. The ambiguous way in which they claim their victims terrifies us. Consider the national apathy toward the AIDS epidemic in the 1980’s. And how present were stories of the Spanish flu epidemic in our American historical narratives before COVID-19 made us reckon with those stories once again? Plagues scares us, and Shakespeare created a work that sits squarely in their ambiguous, awful nature. I think the time has come to reclaim that element of the play’s creation.
When I was a graduate student, Ralph Alan Cohen and Russ McDonald were discussing Lear during a class meeting. Old friends, Cohen and McDonald chuckled that Lear was a play that gets better with age, and they assured us “young people” (the majority of the students in the room were in our twenties) that we would understand it when we were older. I turned 40 shortly before quarantine began. I don’t pretend that is old. And I suspect that Lear still has much to teach me. But as I sat lecturing to students whose faces I never saw, I realized that this play and I have become more deeply intertwined, not by age but by disease. When I reached that last line of the play, Edgar’s haunting, “The oldest have borne the most; we who are young/ Shall never see so much or live so long” I found myself willing the faces behind the boxes to reveal themselves. I wanted to look into their eyes; I wanted to see what they knew. When I was a graduate student in the early 2000’s, my teachers could laugh and tell me Lear was a play for later. But now, after 2020, I will not be able to do the same. My students have seen much and lived long. They have sat for months (and months) with ambiguity. They can, like their predecessors, push away the memories of this chaotic time. Or they can reckon with them. I hope that I can help them find their own way to answer Shakespeare’s imperative: “The weight of this sad time we must obey/ Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (5.3.319-320).
CODA
As I wrote this essay, MSNBC’s 2020 election coverage streamed in from the next room. It had been three days since the election, but the country was still waiting for a projected winner. Several reporters quoted an anonymous White House aid who painted a picture of the incumbent’s administration: “No one wants to tell King Lear the truth.” That weekend, Rudy Giuliani’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping debacle unfolded in Philadelphia in a way that I don’t think even Shakespeare could have imagined. Richard Hall’s brilliant piece for The Independent provided a glimpse into this scattershot moment of US history. But what strikes me as most poignant in his piece is not the unexpected location of Giuliani’s press conference (a small business nestled between a crematorium and an adult book store), the costumed Trump supporters, or the crowd of journalists who abandoned the event when someone announced that CNN called the election for Biden. What I had to read several times to absorb was the ending to his piece. He described the owner of the Fantasy Island bookstore watching the circus, only to be interrupted by a potential customer who asked if he was open. He writes that this moment: “It felt like an ending.” That is how it reads on my computer. But on my phone, where I first read the article, it reads, “It felt like an endin…”
This is what it is to live in a time of plague, a time of civil unrest, a time of insurmountable division. At first, you dream of that fairy tale ending, when tall of this will, finally, be over. But at some point, you realize that moment will never really come. Instead, we must sit and wait for…Nothing. Listening to the echo across the generations… Lurk, lurk.
[1] 5.3.317-322 In the quarto edition of the play, these lines are attributed to Albany. I go with the Folio, following the lead of most editors of conflated versions of Lear
[2] Edmund Kean and William Charles Macready both re-inserted elements of the Shakespearean text in 1823 and 1838 respectively, and Samuel Phelps restored the entirety of Shakespeare’s text in 1845.
[3] For more on this topic, see James Shapiro’s The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, Simon and Schuster, 2015.