#king lear

modern stagings of hamlet should keep them as royalty unless the fact that they aren't is hugely relevant to that production.

benedick and beatrice should be in their early 30s at least and claudio and hero should be noticeably younger. beatrice being adamant against marriage and both her and benedick's reaction to each other makes more sense if they're older.

this one's controversial but i think paris should be in his late teens, not way older. i might make another post elaborating on this but paris' death frames him as another victim of the families' violence, with romeo mourning + identifying him as being in the same situation as himself. it's not that old man paris isn't a good interpretation; it's often the easiest way to show romeo and juliet's positions as children helpless under their parents, and makes very clear what demands are being made of juliet. but i feel that adding paris to the list of young people killed in the play as a byproduct of the adults' violence gives romeo's identification with him more weight. given that he clearly has much more control than romeo and juliet but is still identified as a victim of the violence, i think it makes the most sense if he's a bit older than r&j but still very much young.

modern stagings of julius caesar should keep all the knives as knives, but if there has to be a gun, make cassius shoot himself in the head while caesar and brutus still die by stabbing. i've posted about this but the short version is that's it's the best way to show cassius' death as cowardly in contrast to brutus and caesar, whose deaths still mirror each other.

give the fool in king lear an onstage reason for disappearing. i like the 2018 national theatre version that has edmund kill him, and the 2023 south korean production that had cordelia be the fool in disguise the whole time. there was one from 2014 where lear beat him to death in madness which i think would be very shocking, but to good effect. the subsequent lack of comedy in the play after his disappearance would feel more jarring if we actually see his death.

In King Lear (III:vii) there is a man who is such a minor character that Shakespeare has not given him even a name: he is merely 'First Servant'. All the characters around him – Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund – have fine, long term plans. They think they know how the story is going to end, and they are quite wrong. The servant has no such delusions. He has no notion how the play is going to go. But he understands the present scene. He sees an abomination (the blinding of old Gloucester) taking place. He will not stand it. His sword is out and pointed as his master’s breast in a moment: then Regan stabs him dead from behind. That is his whole part: eight lines all told. But if it were real life and not a play, that is the part it would be best to have acted.

I'm curious about people's levels of familiarity; I intend no judgment or elitism and it's absolutely fine not to be a completionist, btw. I didn't think I would've intended to have read them all at age 25; it just sort of happened that after I passed the halfway point in the middle of 2023, I came out of a reading slump and was motivated to finish. Fwiw I consider myself a hobbyist (I am not involved in academia or professional theater) but I realize that that label is usually attributed to people with less experience.

I also have always loved seeing other bloggers' Shakespeare polls where they put certain plays or characters up against each other, but I'm often left wondering if it's really a 'fair' fight all the time if you're putting up something like Hamlet or Twelfth Night against one of the more obscure works, like the Winter's Tale. It's not a grave affront to vote in those polls if you don't know every play, but I am curious about it.

Liam quoted Shakespeare’s King Lear for the Schemers’ art, which is fitting for Halandil

(Act 1, Scene 1, Line 280)

Time will reveal deceit essentially.

The quote John uses, of course, is from King Lear. We know how Harrow responded to John's recitation of Annabel Lee. What would she think about a story heavily focused on truth and lies, appearance and reality, knowledge and ignorance and sight, in which an arrogant, hubristic individual surrenders a position of absolute power in favour of madness and abjection, discovers moral truths in this position of vulnerability that he had been blind to before, and is given undeserved forgiveness by a dependant he badly mistreated who soon after dies horribly in part as a result of his own actions? Might hit a bit too close to home...

On John's side, obviously it's significant that he's quoting a tyrant father. But does the choice of quote also indicate, consciously or subconsciously, a desire to be forgiven? To have the courage to accept vulnerability and powerlessness, which forgiveness cannot be granted without?