angie's unabridged rant on branagh's lear

how branagh's lear exemplifies the modern deterioration of themed shakespeare

note: god this ended up being so long lmao, but i’ve been writing this for eight months and i want to, like, stop having to keep writing this <3 enjoy!

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about a year ago, instagram served me an ad about how sir kenneth branagh was bringing his london production of king lear to new york in october. i was both (a) mortified that meta’s algorithm had finally found my kryptonite in shakespearean theater, and (b) giddy with excitement as i immediately purchased four 30-under-30 tickets split between two separate nights.

when i did my youth shakespeare group growing up, we were taught to associate branagh’s name with great weight. he was one of the greatest living shakespeareans of our time and our teacher would make sure we knew it, showing us his film adaptations of hamlet and much ado about nothing to teach us about the respective plays. admittedly, watching branagh breathe life into these masterful texts with masterful performances was fairly formative for me when i was encountering these difficult literary works for the first time. to think that i could now breathe the same air as this guy! it was a no-brainer. i had to see him.

even to normal people, branagh is still a renowned actor-director. he’s professor gilderoy lockhart in the second harry potter movie, quantum physicist niels bohr in oppenheimer, and the titular detective hercule poirot in the however many agatha christie mystery films that must have come out since that first orient express one. he’s also a graduate and former president of the royal academy of dramatic arts (rada), which produced the current artistic directors for both shakespeare’s globe theater and the royal shakespeare company. wicked’s cynthia erivo is currently rada’s vice president; harry potter’s alan rickman was branagh’s classmate; and other notable alumni include ralph fiennes (conclave, any wes anderson film, also harry potter’s voldemort), tom hiddleston (thor), michael sheen (good omens, that one head vampire in twilight), and phoebe waller-bridge (fleabag). so, pretty goated pedigree, all non-shakespeare things considered.

but the most important part of my impression of branagh is that he is a Big Shakespeare Nerd. he is the recipient of both an olivier award (named after sir lawrence olivier, the most famous shakespearean actor of all time) and an honorary doctorate degree in literature from the shakespeare institute at the university of birmingham (england, not alabama), the top shakespeare graduate program in the world. he is argued to be one of the most iconic living shakespeareans today, his only real competition being sir ian mckellen (gandalf in the lord of the rings, magneto in x-men), sir derek jacobi (i guess he’s in gladiator ii but he was also in the original, the king in lily james’s live-action cinderella, edward viii in the crown, mr. wheen in nanny mcphee), and like. maybe sir patrick stewart (captain jean-luc picard in star trek, professor charles xavier in x-men).

so since we’ve established that branagh’s a big deal, now imagine my absolute appall when i started reading reviews of branagh’s lear from the west end in london where the production had debuted the year before, and everyone rated it only three out of five stars. three! that’s a 60%! a d-minus! not even four stars, if not four and a half? i was shocked to read that people had very few good things to say about it.

henceforth, we are gathered here today, so that i can write a long, disorganized rant about it.

from what i could see, the general consensus among the disappointed critics was that:

(a) it was too short,
(b) some of the characterizations didn’t work, and
(c) it wasn’t sad enough.

for those who are unaware, these are big concerns for a shakespearean tragedy, because:

(a) they’re usually insufferably long,
(b) the characterizations are so, so important to creating a convincing pull of emotional investment from the audience, and
(c) what do you mean, one of the most pored-over and well-studied tragedies of world literature isn’t sad enough???

but these are even bigger concerns for branagh specifically: he’s already done the other two famous shakespearean tragedies (hamlet in 1996, macbeth in 2013) to great acclaim—the two that, with lear, traditionally make up the famous shakespearean trifecta of tragedy for an actor—so to have a disappointing lear unable to live up is just. confusing, to say the least. it doesn’t make sense. it’s like saying bts released a flop album.

reading these reviews before seeing the show, i started to feel a bit fraught. should i not be as excited, in case i get majorly let down? was i about to see an imperfect show from someone i was taught to see as one of the untouchables?

then i thought: okay. how bad/not bad is it to see an imperfect play, really? a perfect show doesn’t exist, and an imperfect show is nothing to be afraid of. so what am i actually feeling? i guess it’s just the typical annoyance that activates when i see one clear, root ailment with a play, where all of whose flaws end up as symptoms of this ailment. often, the ailment is just some version of carelessness: too little understanding of theme x, too much emphasis on character y, not enough buildup with plot point z. then it’s combined with the performance of pacing, delivery, and blocking, and other standard theatrical variables. then it’s combined again with the unavoidable industry variables of budgeting, scheduling, and logistics. all of these factors normally amount to an imperfect show. this is expected: different artists have different perceptions of different works, and then some fiddly management intervenes (usually to compromise the original artistic vision) so the show is actually profitable, so it makes sense that i won’t love every show i see.

but i am an insufferable snob, so with shakespeare i will argue slightly differently.

my thoughts about the difficulties of staging shakespeare, generally

first, consider that virtually everyone stages the bard’s plays. there are so many versions of his plays, analyzing from every possible angle how his characters are mysteriously un-understandable yet perfect objects for embodying key human experiences; how his anthropological plots reveal the folklore, politics, and culture of the english renaissance; and how his writing is argumentative and expository and poetic and kind of just plain crazy all at once. productions and theories exist for every significant point in time in world history since the early modern period, and each one has a different perspective of which lines, which moments, which relationships, which scenes are the most moving or memorable. the fandom is so serious it’s permeated our highest levels of academia, it’s changed the literal english language (in case you didn’t know that phrases like “sleep tight” or “a green-eyed monster” or “a foregone conclusion” were all invented by shakespeare), and it’s survived whole centuries without the help of the internet and with no sign of stopping. with such a wealth of resources, experts, and productions of shakespeare’s works available, will said fandom (bloodthirsty for a thousand different conceptions of their own “perfect” shows) really let a careless production come away quietly? hahahahahahahaha. no! it would be inexcusable!

even if one could not access, or were simply to remain wholly blind to, the universe of existing shakespearean ventures, the bard’s plays have plenty of directorial value in the original text alone. do you need to necessarily subscribe to the opinions of all the scholars and artists and historians that have ever said anything about the bard? probably not, because his plays should still roughly communicate what is going on and why. i hope you’ll indulge me with an example.

consider the play-within-a-play rehearsal scene in hamlet, wherein hamlet rudely complains that the actors he hired are shitty (and don’t worry, if you don’t wanna read early modern english at the moment, i provide a crude paraphrase that follows right after this):

HAMLET

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it,
as many of your players do, I had as lief the
town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget
a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it
offends me to the soul to hear a robustious
periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to
very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who
for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such
a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it
out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.

First Player

I warrant your honour.

HAMLET

Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion
be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the
word to the action; with this special o'erstep not
the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is
from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the
first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the
mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature,
scorn her own image, and the very age and body of
the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone,
or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful
laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the
censure of the which one must in your allowance
o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be
players that I have seen play, and heard others
praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely,
that, neither having the accent of Christians nor
the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so
strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of
nature's journeymen had made men and not made them
well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

so, as you can see, hamlet sucks up way too much of the word count (like me) just to fucking obliterate this poor incompetent theater troupe (relatable), as a twenty-something asshole who thinks he knows everything. but you can also see exactly why he thinks he needs to obliterate them:

• hamlet finds their articulation terrible, saying he’d rather a town crier say the lines because at least he’d be able to hear clearly what’s being said, compared to this nonsense the players are mouthing into existence.

• he cites with disapproval how they’re so excited in their gesticulations that they “saw the air” with their hands. saw, like the construction tool. they’re sawing the air. they’re waving their arms about blindly, plainly, without intention, and much too often.

• he instructs them that they must “suit the action to the word, the word to the action” instead of overdoing their acting unnaturally and deviating from their speech. he’s saying that this is alienating the audience members who are trying to understand the storytelling, but failing to do so because the motions and facial expressions they make do not reflect the meaning of their lines.

i concede that this is a particularly biased example because shakespeare probably wrote these passages to complain about the very direction-lacking actors he had to work with for his plays, but it still stands that the bard likes to be precise about directing the actors from the text, even if the actors are from four hundred years into the future.

this, in combination with the fact that the plays often appeal to universal human experiences, leads to the phenomenon of themed shakespeare. people love doing this. it’s unlike anything i’ve seen in the theater world, to adapt a playwright’s language so faithfully yet transport its characters across wildly distinct settings. if you read fanfiction, it’s the equivalent of writing shakespeare plays into different alternate universes all the time (some folks are familiar with the headlines about the trump!au julius caesar by the public a few years ago; the movie ten things i hate about you is just a high school au of the taming of the shrew; my dear friend cj obasi and i discussed at length the royal shakespeare company’s brexit-themed king john while we were designing our own production of the play in 2022). can you imagine any artist’s work being so tenacious as to survive centuries of human history and get dressed up in a thousand different costumes like that? so, with all these different settings and theme choices, my question is: is there an obligation to direct a shakespeare play that not only honors its quality of humanity and universality, so carefully set into poetry and preserved over centuries and across oceans, but also technically, thematically, theatrically brings something fresh and innovative that speaks to the modern struggles we experience today? probably, yeah. and people get real pissy when they think the wrong direction is being taken and both camps are being squandered.

and, of course, this is just the unedited, original versions of the plays that we’re talking about here. since shakespeare plays are long, they are often staged abridged. despite this, i have still definitely fallen asleep at so many of them, and not all of them were because they were bad or boring—they just had cuts that made moments too long or too short, and they lose the audience’s attention, especially with the older english language as an added obstacle for most viewers. even in shakespeare’s day, the theater houses would shorten his works to suit the audience’s tastes, hence the tradition of making cuts in his plays today and presenting abridged forms. the story would otherwise take so long to unfold in its unabridged form, that you would get physically tired as a viewer from spending energy processing everything you’re looking at. if you were to perform a full-length shakespeare play it would take, like. maybe four or five hours? so, what words to cut? how do you choose? do you shave off important poetry, decapitate the side plots, even shut out whole characters? it’s doubly hard to keep everything that’s important with this additional task guaranteeing that you can’t work with 100% of the source material. you must operate below full capacity of the play. you have to essentially edit shakespeare. i mean, who are you to even do that! pick and highlight and position your favorite lines as you see fit? who do you think you are! what do you know! it’s a Dilemma.

so one can see how it can absolutely feel like, should you undertake this quest, you’d need an ironclad vision of which ideas and themes you want to let shine in the play. some message of the play needs to be so compelling and powerful and worthy to you of immortalizing into art that it guides how you edit the lines, how you cut, how you carve out the figure in your mind and bring it into reality from the rubble and rock. this is the case for any play, shakespeare or not; not only must your observation of said themes be true, but your interpretations of it must be solid and unwavering. you are making a case, an argument that this theme is important, and you must execute the best parts of it with care so that it gets translated properly into the brains of everyone watching it. you must also be able to deal with the fact that such tasks are impossible, and that you will not reach everyone. especially with shakespeare, where these observations and interpretations exist in these uncomfortably formalized worlds, guardrailed by both academia and industry, your play will always fall short to the thousands of different frameworks of slightly different sets of thematic priorities. hence, imperfect productions.

so that’s basically the family of main difficulties in my head with approaching shakespeare generally. but, ahaha, would you believe it: i have more when it comes to lear specifically. i’ll now move us to narrowing our scope a little to the play at hand. forget how one does any shakespeare play well—how does one even do just king lear well?

my thoughts about staging king lear, specifically

in case you need it, i’ll provide the plot first, which proceeds as follows:

• king lear is nearing old age, and has decided to bequeath to his daughters equal portions of his kingdom. in exchange, he asks each to profess their daughterly love for him; goneril and regan comply with great poeticism, while cordelia simply refuses. he disowns her and splits her third of the kingdom among goneril and regan, then banishes the earl of kent for objecting to his decision. admiring cordelia’s humility, the king of france marries her despite the absence of a dowry, and they leave for france. in an aside, we learn that goneril and regan actually feel quite superior to their father and seek to exploit him. meanwhile, edmund, the bastard son to the earl of gloucester, seeks his father’s fortunes and deceives him to believe that his older brother, edgar (the legitimate heir), plots against his father’s life.

• lear visits goneril and regan, but they are dismissive and demand his army not follow him into their estates. edmund advises edgar disguise himself as a beggar named “poor tom” and go into hiding; edgar escapes the kingdom into the countryside. kent also dons a disguise as “caius” and entreats lear to employ him as a servant; lear agrees, and kent gets to continue watching over the king as they weather the storm with the fool, lear’s court jester. goneril and regan meet at gloucester’s house to strategize, but mistreat the disguised kent and refuse to see lear when he arrives. furious at the ingratitude and their attempts to strip him of his remaining power, he leaves as a storm approaches.

• lear begins to go mad in the storm, taking shelter with “caius,” the fool, and “poor tom.” kent writes letters to cordelia about her father. gloucester, who saw lear bullied by his daughters into the storm and finds him in the country, leads them to shelter and directs them to dover, where cordelia resides. gloucester tells edmund he is providing intelligence to france to secure lear’s safety, but he rats his father out to regan’s husband. despite some growing territorial disputes between them, he and goneril’s husband collaborate to gouge gloucester’s eyes out as punishment for treason.

• gloucester escapes, runs into his son as “poor tom” and is guided by him to dover to seek cordelia. he runs into lear, who is taken away to cordelia, and is defended by edgar when goneril’s servant appears and tries to kill gloucester. gloucester thanks edgar by giving him his purse and and asking him to return the letters on his person to edmund. edgar reads the letters and learns of edmund’s plots to marry goneril. lear rests in cordelia’s care with kent by his side. a battle between france and britain has begun.

• edgar gives goneril’s husband the letters, but does not reveal the contents of them. edmund reveals he has promised his love to both goneril and regan. edmund commands regan’s troops, arrests lear and cordelia, and secretly tells a supervising officer that they are to be executed. goneril and regan argue over edmund, regan falls ill and dies offstage, and goneril confesses to poisoning her. goneril’s husband tries to arrest edmund for treason and explodes over goneril agreeing to marry edmund if he kills her husband. edgar appears, disguised in armor, and accuses edmund of being a traitor. he fights edmund and wins, sharing that their father died when edgar asked him for permission to fight edmund. a servant brings goneril’s husband a bloody knife taken from her heart, informing him of her death. lear enters carrying cordelia’s dead body, grieving and later dying onstage. kent, goneril’s husband, and edgar are left with a kingdom to rule and the traumas of the play.

whew! lots going on! lots of, uh, interesting stuff going on. let’s break down some of the storytelling focal points and characterizations we’re seeing here. i’ll be supplementing this section with some fantastic study from an external source: marjorie garber’s reader, shakespeare after all.

the politics

lear is dividing his kingdom, which sounds simple enough. except we’re talking about dividing the empire of great britain, which is actually a big and serious and maybe definitely alarming deal. imagine president trump announcing he has decided to split america into three pieces—say, the northeast, the south, and the midwest + west coast + southwest—and he will be appointing his children as the future presidents of all three. that’s kind of bonkers! no one would want that!

not only is this not just a random imaginary kingdom following its usual norms of dividing birthright territory equally amongst heirs, but this is also a critique of a real-life event of threatened constitutional disputes in british government at the time. a few years before shakespeare wrote lear, king james i, disapproving of the results of an election for the house of commons, nullified the election results (sound familiar?) and installed the losing candidate as mp despite much protest from parliament. the uproar attacked king james and his abandonment of the constitution of england, a position very much morally favored in shakespeare’s characterizations of kent, cordelia, gloucester, and others in the play who disagree with lear’s singleminded way of rule that disregards the institutions to which they are all bound by their offices. political commentary here does not detail merely a theoretical lapse in democracy, but a cataclysmic change in the governance of the land of lear’s domain (like, there is no clarification on whether lear’s daughters were intended to rule feudal-lord style under one big dynastic conquest, or if the kingdom divided into thirds would result in three whole independent states, or some secret third option).

plus, these political institutions are clearly responsible for instigating these feelings of power-hungry greed in all the villainous characters. everyone who stakes a claim on lear’s life does so for the political power they’d gain at court. it threatens their way of life as a member of the royal cabinet, it threatens their socioeconomic ability to finance their family’s wellbeing, and it threatens their professional capacity for the work they do as their career on behalf of the crown. power, survival, and dignity. check, check, and check.

the families

why do goneril and regan hate lear, while cordelia loves him? goneril and regan, the two older (evil, scheming) sisters, hold transactional relationships with lear, and you can tell by the way they illustrate their speech to him with vocabulary of worth, merit, or monetary connotations. cordelia occupies the opposite extreme seat, humble to a fault, forgoing floral and excessive language for the cold, hard truth; this, as we know, leads to issues of her own that she has to rectify when lear finally returns to her, battered to a thread by the many tempests of the play. but being led by cordelia, asking her once again if she loves him, and cordelia being less proud now to clear the misunderstanding that put the play into motion, he comes to see her as the “true” daughter that goneril and regan had failed to be.

the failed daughter character is interesting, in that it’s a simple origin story for a villainess, but goneril and regan aren’t just flopover antagonists. they have pride, ambition, leadership skills, and cunning. they arguably demonstrate as very politically literate and capable of being queens of their own kingdom thirds, compared to cordelia. cordelia’s talent certainly does not lie in mediation or negotiation—she is simply a daughter, pious and loyal to something other than her father or sisters, something grey and veiled and thin that enrages them for redirecting her devotion.

and where cordelia is absent, there is her twin flame: the fool. cordelia is historically double-casted with the fool—meaning, in shakespeare’s time lear, that one actor would have played both characters. they are both coddled by lear; he treats them like the same child throughout the play. over the course of the scenes he has with the fool, he listens to his jests and mocking without lashing out or attacking back, depending on the fool as he starts realizing how badly he messed up with cordelia. in treating the fool as an incubation chamber for processing his regret, he comes to beg her for her forgiveness.

there’s another layer to the play’s idea of family; part of the word “nature” coming up so frequently in lear is in reference to the conceptions of the “natural family” versus the “unnatural family.” take the issue of gloucester’s misguided fatherhood: he turns his back on edgar, his “natural” (legitimate) son, and entrusts his favor with edmund, his “unnatural” (illegitimate) son. edmund, who is an antagonist of ruthlessness, individualism, and masculinity, embodies the idea of the favorable son more than edgar, who is uninterested in the politics of his position at court and cannot defend himself against meaningless lies slung about by someone envious of his birthright. only by edgar’s eventual beggardom and gloucester’s blinding (a “natural” blindness, or the thieving of his “natural” sight) is there clarity (“unnatural” sight) about edgar’s christlike loyalty, faithfulness, and generosity towards his betrayed father, despite not knowing he helped down the perilous mountain by his blood-related son (an “unnatural” blindness).

the madness

what happens when lear goes mad? he loses total control of his mind, and he has no power over his perception of reality. this idea of losing control over yourself, not being able to make your mind, your hands, your words, your eyes do what you want them to do, no matter how much you will them to. imagine if the different parts of you are operating in ways you object to, ways you do not consent to or intend to. this would reasonably invoke a feeling of pure, cold fear in anyone. the kind that locks your body in paralysis, trickling down your spine, unitchable. hopeless. think about a time when you had zero control over yourself (i’m reminded of when i fainted after taking a 5-mg edible and going to the tampa zoo with the veritones. yeah, uh. this is why i don’t get high lmao). in short, that shit is fucking terrifying. so, reasonably, it terrifies lear. when he goes out into the storm, the tempest now exists outside of his head. we are both witnessing some great literary coincidence of weather matching the vibes of the plot, and also maybe looking a little too deeply into his totally marble-less mind.

to an extent, you see this idea of losing control manifested throughout the play in weird and twisted ways. lear’s daughters, his children who are parts of him, are going off into the world with his name—and absolutely wreaking havoc. goneril and regan are tormenting him into storms and torturing his allies in court; cordelia has married into the rival empire and refused to perform how much she loves him. his most trusted earls are telling him his ideas are wrong; his sons-in-law, in charge of the dukedoms that help him run the state, spill blood on ground that wouldn’t have been theirs if it weren’t for lear. these appendages of the royal throne are all directly disobeying his commands. to us, they’re separate entities and operating of their own volition. to lear, they are the dead limbs while he is the malfunctioning brain. this is the core tragedy of the play. the play is originally titled "the historie, heir for history, hero for tragedy.” edgar himself eulogizes at the end of the play, that “we cannot see so much nor have lived so long.”

in conclusion, uh. there’s a lot that happens. haha. and unfortunately, branagh swings and misses like. virtually all of them.

my thoughts on branagh’s staging of lear

okay, i’ve kept you guys waiting long enough—so, the actual show.

the production begins with a ritual. ensemble, dressed in viking-esque rags, furs, rope, and leathers, slam height-length wooden spears upon the ground in rhythmic unison, eventually circling around lear and clunking the heads of their spears against his own spear to form a conic pyre. lear blows sharply at the junction of spears as if they were a flame that could go out, and ensemble confirms the symbolic action by lifting their spears away gently. it gets the message across that this is a production themed after that prehistoric age of man, where there are no farms or buildings, no courts or systems, but only people and tools and rudimentary social patterns. what is the value of using indigenous and tribal imagery here? the rest of the show refrains from any additional assertions of this caveman aesthetic, either in acting style or language delivery. i remember being in the crowd and thinking a big, loud “ugh” in my head.

i’m assuming that what this choice was actually meant to elucidate, according to an interview with the shed’s artistic director, was branagh’s directorial philosophy for this play about nature and the natural—but this is distinct from the concept of the natural that we talked about before. branagh sees this play as one where its characters do not have enough time to digest and response ideally to the developments of the plot, and therefore they act hastily. the “hideous rashness” that kent deems lear’s final decisions as king at the start of the show is quoted very confidently by branagh in the interview: the characters rush to respond, they react immediately, and they contemplate none of what they hear and act myopically. the “natural” to branagh is not the supposed or the normalized or the traditional, but the instinctual and the immediate and the subconscious.

lear wastes no time, beginning the play with his “meantime we shall express our darker purpose” monologue. this is a second move to eradicate the political institutions of the original text: branagh has cut the introductory dialogue between kent (lear’s right hand man and the play’s moral center) and gloucester (a closely allied noble of lear’s court) as they introduce to the audience three of the several political forces in the play before lear even enters:

1. that of lear’s unclear positions towards the duke of albany (the husband of goneril, lear’s eldest daughter) and the duke of cornwall (the husband of regan, lear’s second-oldest daughter);

2. that of lear’s decision to divide up the kingdom as a possible result of his aforementioned indecision (more on this later); and

3. that of gloucester’s bastard younger son, edmund, brothered by edgar, the legitimate son who stands to inherit gloucester’s lands and courtly powers.

this cut choice is immediately reductive of the political strife that drive lear and his court to nontrivial degrees of demise, and throughout the production the mentions to lear’s crown are struck from the lines in this way. the cuts thus set up a presumptuous and dubious foundation that the politics of the tragedy are dispensable, and the introspection on the family drama that remains simply fails to operate beyond first-order considerations of the daughters’ own desires and benefit. goneril and regan (both cast with the only black women of the show, in an unfortunate faux pas) are now simply just villainous for villainy’s sake, which their characterizations are not built to set up in the way that it could carry if it were, instead, richardian or iago-esque.

in fact, the first time i saw the show, i thought for a minute that goneril and regan were trying to be turned on their heads as characters of radical feminism, justified in their bloodlust and anger. but their hatred for cordelia came so out of nowhere that i questioned whether or not the only two black actresses in the production were directed to express their hatred of cordelia, a white woman, as a racial dynamic that validates their search for vengeance. but that potential mirage of violent feminist resurgence dissolved the moment goneril and regan set their sights on edmund, an attempt so beneath them especially with the total lack of magnetic sociopathy in the text.

this brings me to the next point: edmund’s power struggle is also dimmed with branagh’s direction. his original character grew up unwanted and unloved, so resultantly an evil stoicism should be flat and clear on his face. but this production’s edmund was eager, deriving joy from pursuing his ambitions. it would be naïve of edmund to act this way, especially since goneril and regan both eventually stake their lustful affections upon him. a gleeful bastard like that in branagh’s production, as in shakespeare’s other plays where emotions reign control over supporting characters, would revel in the attention and lose track of his ultimate mission. edmund’s potential for a wholly sociopathic personality is just aching there in the text, waiting to be realized! yes, he is villainous (“i pant for life: some good I mean to do, / despite of mine own nature”), but he is also a person who believes he has integrity (“i will maintain / my truth and honour firmly”) by his ambitions for his father’s seat in court. i acknowledge this specific point could just be my preference and personal interpretation, though.

when the play gets to edmund’s deception of his father by giving him a forged letter mimicking edgar’s hand, i will say i think edmund was perfectly done. there’s a specific part that was smartly delivered, of which i will provide the original lines here:

EDMUND

If your honour judge it meet, I will place you
where you shall hear us confer of this, and by an
auricular assurance have your satisfaction; and
that without any further delay than this very evening.

GLOUCESTER

He cannot be such a monster--

EDMUND

Nor is not, sure.

the above is a fairly simplistic line, but a bit of emphasis is key. the way the edmund onstage did it, he made it sound doubly like “nor is not, sure” and “nor is, not sure” and that was actually pretty cool. deception via seeding uncertainty, probabilism, paralysis. easy, breezy, beautiful, covergirl.

and then there’s kent. the loyal, wise, truly crownworthy character. kent is, in short, the king we want lear to be. yet his scenes were so weak, cut down to primarily his messenger functions betwixt lear and his daughters, and his scenes of counsel with lear and the fool were like watching a mother look after her husband and her child. kent is like joshua to a nonexistent moses, so i get why it’s a difficult role to play the honorable, humble hand to the king, but there was no firmness or righteousness. there was just a lot of chastising and lost following as the fool joked about with old english jests not made clear to the modern american audience.

so, the black womanhood of goneril and regan against the white fatherhood of lear, the devious greed of edmund against the fearful panic of edgar, the principled purity of kent against the childlike loyalty of the fool—they all fell flat to my initial expectations.

i will concede that, outside of all this, regan was pretty good in this production in that she was characterized as a specific flavor of boss woman—an effective two-faced manipulator—and juxtaposed against the relatively simplistic pure fury of goneril, regan just came off as a stronger performer with a textured complication to play with onstage. edgar was also good. his youthful desperation, his resilience, his trauma and lamentation, and his filial piety reformed as he leads his blinded father down from the cliff were all a cohesive meditation on the wronged son that has to clean up the messes of others (like henry v, or hamlet). branagh, as always, is regal and full of bravado, his classical accent rich and experienced, and his slow breakdown is clear. he is a king who is stained, and you see the life leave him in pieces as he starts to tire, his mind deflates, and he gives in to the helplessness and total lack of willpower. when he lets out that silent wail, carrying cordelia’s limp body, it is several minutes long and palpable for every second. the math just didn’t add up for me considering the whole production, but the notable performances breathed life into the pages that we all came for.

concluding thoughts

reading shakespeare is a little bit like learning math. you don’t just plop yourself into a field theory class. you build up to it: you learn the fundamentals and the theorems, you have teachers and office hours and peers to compare your work to, and you expose yourself to the different applications and manifestations of different concepts and patterns long enough to get comfortable with them. i feel like shakespeare (and most literature and art) is often portrayed to like. strike something innate within the soul, should said soul be smart enough and naturally literarily inclined and worthy of artistic enlightenment? and i don’t agree with that. you’re not supposed to understand everything shakespeare writes at first glance; it’s not an installment of the marvel cinematic universe (which i guess would be, like, basic arithmetic in my analogy). you don’t have to be arbitrarily predisposed to liking shakespeare, or intellectually brawny enough to brute force your way through it. guides are important! personal applications are important! not some bigwig, hazy, idealistic mirage of depth carried by a single line.

some credits

to marjorie garber, thank you for teaching me so much about king lear and other plays via your reader, “shakespeare after all”, which is my biggest joy to read right now—thanks, marge! to my youth shakespeare group: i have you to credit for programming a traumatizing level of nerdability (bardability?) into me at a young age. to jeffrey wilson: apologies for not writing my shakespeare expos papers with nearly as much zest as this substack post, one day i’ll rewrite my korean shamanist macbeth essay on here and make you proud. to the bipoc critics lab: expect a similar unofficial review of the public theater’s twelfth night. to my mom: i cannot promise that writing this post has not deterred me from my lsat prep, sorry and love you!