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Feb. 4th, 2011 03:24 amWe saw the National Theatre's King Lear film tonight. Julie, new to it, says it's good but doesn't compare with Othello or Hamlet, her favorite.
I'd never seen this on stage or screen. I was struck by the cliff scene - I hadn't noticed before that because on stage the cliff would be imaginary anyway, Edgar has to let us know through an aside that he's making it up, that the imaginary cliff is an imaginary imaginary one.
I was also struck by all the Hamlet parallels, highlighted since I was seeing it on the same screen put on by the same production company two months after. Approximate length, mass dueling/stabbing/poisoning final scene, protagonist's best friend saying he'll kill himself, feigned madness, bewilderingly multiplied foils/doubles, idealized victim girl whose name ends in -elia, "Where did she die"/"Drowned! O, where?" question asked about said girl, family conflicts that veer bloody, general 'life sucks' theme. I actually agree with Julie that this one's not his greatest success, but it may have been, in part, an attempt to recreate or outdo the play that was. To outdo Hamlet! What other task could he have set himself next? Or perhaps it's when he felt he might have lost whatever he'd had there at his peak, wanted to reclaim it. I wonder if his relative failure at that could be ascribed to something like influence anxiety (maybe just because you've become your own precursor it doesn't make that relationship tidier). One of the hallmarks of influence anxiety, formal or structural elegance and balance - complexity that stays coherent - suffering while the intensity level of certain peak effects gets turned up even higher, might explain some of the play's explosiveness and redundancy, or at least why choosing a story given to those might have appealed to Shakespeare. He wanted something even more devastating. Which maybe it is. But did that come at a cost, some loss of what it could have been?
(And of course Edmund is a revision of Iago - and not an improvement on him, to my mind. Julie says Iago is the best character ever.)
I'd never seen this on stage or screen. I was struck by the cliff scene - I hadn't noticed before that because on stage the cliff would be imaginary anyway, Edgar has to let us know through an aside that he's making it up, that the imaginary cliff is an imaginary imaginary one.
I was also struck by all the Hamlet parallels, highlighted since I was seeing it on the same screen put on by the same production company two months after. Approximate length, mass dueling/stabbing/poisoning final scene, protagonist's best friend saying he'll kill himself, feigned madness, bewilderingly multiplied foils/doubles, idealized victim girl whose name ends in -elia, "Where did she die"/"Drowned! O, where?" question asked about said girl, family conflicts that veer bloody, general 'life sucks' theme. I actually agree with Julie that this one's not his greatest success, but it may have been, in part, an attempt to recreate or outdo the play that was. To outdo Hamlet! What other task could he have set himself next? Or perhaps it's when he felt he might have lost whatever he'd had there at his peak, wanted to reclaim it. I wonder if his relative failure at that could be ascribed to something like influence anxiety (maybe just because you've become your own precursor it doesn't make that relationship tidier). One of the hallmarks of influence anxiety, formal or structural elegance and balance - complexity that stays coherent - suffering while the intensity level of certain peak effects gets turned up even higher, might explain some of the play's explosiveness and redundancy, or at least why choosing a story given to those might have appealed to Shakespeare. He wanted something even more devastating. Which maybe it is. But did that come at a cost, some loss of what it could have been?
(And of course Edmund is a revision of Iago - and not an improvement on him, to my mind. Julie says Iago is the best character ever.)
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