'KING LEAR', NAHUM TATE, ZHDANOV, AUSCHWITZ

There are books read at one stage in one’s life that one may hate, or simply fail to understand.  Return to them after a decade of new experiences, and they may be seen in a completely different light. 

            Equally, there is the poem that in one mood may be found intolerable; whereas at another time nothing else will do.

            As with the taste of individuals, so with the nation as a whole.  Donne was largely ignored by the Victorians, but his tone resonated with the mood between the two world wars.

 

King Lear has always been a difficult play.  It exists in A and B versions.   The B version is slightly shorter.  One theory is that Shakespeare took fright at scenes such as the law being represented by a mad king, a wandering bedlam and a fool and self-censored it.  The actors having learned the words, however, later pooled their memories and reconstructed the original. 

            Whichever version you take, you still have the blinding of Gloucester, and the demonic nature of two daughters.  The blinding of Gloucester may seem pretty tame stuff compared with, say, the rape and torture of Mary Ann Leneghan before her murder in a Reading car park by a drugs gang, but the studied cruelty of the thing puts Regan and Cornwall right up there with the serious sadists.  While fantastic in some respects – madmen ranting at storms, or the meditations of the Fool - the play in other respects is horribly like real life.  If we would be unfortunate to meet some one quite as consistently vicious as Goneril, most of us could probably say we’ve met some one who could run her pretty close. 

 Shakespeare made Cordelia die. He did not have to do this. In the sources he drew on for the story, there was precedent for keeping her alive. But her death was in keeping with the view of human existence embodied in the play.  Victorian critics speculated on a crisis in Shakespeare’s life during the writing of his great quartet of tragedies; but psychological criticism is always speculative territory, and I have no intention of going there.  Suffice to say that in King Lear there is a bleakness of vision, and the bleakness remains whether you see Lear as redeemed by love, or as learning nothing from his suffering.

 Enter Nahum Tate, centre stage.  Tate was prolific in his own right – plays and poems and hymns – but also known for adapting the works of other authors, including the translation of a Latin poem about syphilis.  Perhaps the most famous thing about him was his adaptation of King Lear.  Cordelia survives, and marries Edgar. 

            Deism was in the air.  Optimism: syphilis in poetry and reality notwithstanding.  Accept the view of a universe wound up like a clock, and where was the room for issues like cosmic evil?  It was why Dr Johnson felt able to dismiss the tragedies, and to see the comedies as the high point of Shakespeare's art.   The Enlightenment grew from Deism; the clear light of Reason that would be the solution to all problems, purging the world of the priest-ridden superstitions of the past, and the demeaning concept of Original Sin.

            Uncomfortable King Lear, reminding us uncomfortably if not of our own animality – animals, after all, don’t behave with the calculated callousness of  a Regan – then at least of our own beastliness. Tate’s sanitized Lear seems to have been more popular with the Victorians than Shakespeare’s Lear:  understandable in an age that accepted the inevitability of human progress and the possibility of future human perfection. 

            Zhdanov, the Soviet Cultural Commissar, went one better and abolished Shakespeare’s tragedies altogether.  Tragedy did not tie in well with socialist realism.  Tragedy was a relic of the bad old world of capitalism: in the brave new world of communism, it would have no place. 

            But the past reasserted itself.  The Fall is not evaded simply by ignoring it. Hitler offered an ancient symbol on a field of symbolic blood, and the most advanced nation in Europe lapped it up.  With the revelations from the concentration camps – Mervyn Peake, of Gormenghast fame, went into the liberated Belsen as a war artist, and had to be strapped down when he came out - modern consciousness regained a sense of the depravity of which civilized humanity is capable.  With that, came a restoration of King Lear to its rightful place. 

                “Is man no more than this?” might not have been the question to have asked of an age of optimism, but it seemed pretty pertinent in the wake of Auschwitz.