My favorite Shakespeare play. A king who wanted to relinquish responsibility while holding on to the benefits of his position. Blinded to the duplicity of his two opportunistic daughters who tell him what he wants to hear, persecuting the daughter who truly loves him and tells him the truth. Similarly blinded, Gloucester is only able to "see" the truth once his figurative blindness is made literal & his eyes gouged out.
> A king who wanted to relinquish responsibility while holding on to the benefits of his position. Blinded to the duplicity of his two opportunistic daughters who tell him what he wants to hear, persecuting the daughter who truly loves him and tells him the truth.
I saw Stacy Keach as Lear in DC.
Glouster is sitting there, blinded, gripped by despair, and Lear, mad as a hatter, is patting him on the back, saying:
He specifically goes to town on King Lear and gets into some interesting discussions on how he thinks the earlier Lear Shakespeare referenced is structurally better.
Also reveals Tolstoy's own perspective on writing as a moral endeavor which he feels Shakespeare failed at, as if Shakespeare had a morality it was "people should be good, but not too good"
Wow this is great, thank you! As someone with a reasonably positive opinion of all three here (Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Orwell), I must say Orwell's clarity is remarkable.
> It is a mistake to write Tolstoy off as a moralist attacking an artist. […] But his main aim, in his later years, was to narrow the range of human consciousness. One's interests, one's points of attachment to the physical world and the day-to-day struggle, must be as few and not as many as possible. […] Indeed his whole theory of ‘crazes’ or ‘epidemic suggestions’, in which he lumps together such things as the Crusades and the Dutch passion of tulip growing, shows a willingness to regard many human activities as mere ant-like rushings to and fro, inexplicable and uninteresting. Clearly he could have no patience with a chaotic, detailed, discursive writer like Shakespeare. His reaction is that of an irritable old man who is being pestered by a noisy child. ‘Why do you keep jumping up and down like that? Why can't you sit still like I do?’ In a way the old man is in the right, but the trouble is that the child, has a feeling in its limbs which the old man has lost. And if the old man knows of the existence of this feeling, the effect is merely to increase his irritation: he would make children senile, if he could.
His perception of King Lear's true moral, of Tolstoy (or Gandhi) as “saint”, and of “creeds […] which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power” — in all of this Orwell hits the nail on the head IMO.
Dorian Lynskey's Orwell biography The Ministry of Truth spends a chunk of its time on interactions between Huxley, Wells and Orwell. I found much of that fascinating, picturing these esteemed authors critiquing each others works(sometimes over supper).
Full recommendation for the book, even if only for the Zamyatin chapter collapsing everyone from Rand to George Lucas in to twenty pages or so.
> Also reveals Tolstoy's own perspective on writing as a moral endeavor which he feels Shakespeare failed at, as if Shakespeare had a morality it was "people should be good, but not too good"
I couldn't agree more, which is why I like Shakespeare so much better than Tolstoy.
We need more writing where people are the best they can be. Imagine the good Shakespeare could have done by making his characters the best role models. People imitate, and Shakespeare has incredible reach.
As I get older, I have little patience for flawed characters, and love it when I see someone act good all the time in fiction.
Edit: Tintin, for example, is one of my favorite fictional characters of all time. He is smart, athletic, capable, dependable, and, most importantly, always acts in good faith.
Another perspective: when I was younger, I liked Hardy Boys and Tom Swift because of their earnest niceness. As I get older, I realize that the world is a complex place and people (characters) are nuanced. Reduction to black/white (good/bad) squeezes the nuance and thus the humanity.
For similar reasons, I don't enjoy reading about the good works of (Western) holy people. (Buddhism and Hindu stories, the small exposure I have, seem to contain nuanced characters.)
I understand reality is nuanced, but I want to be exposed to ideals when I read. I'm not too interested in recreating reality. I want to see what to strive towards. I recall the Hardy Boys with a lot of fondness. They meant a lot to me as a child.
I get that, and it's a challenge for me as a Shakespeare actor and director. I often work with these "flawed" characters, and early in the process there's this question of "do I really want to tell the story about this person?"
I've got only limited patience for people being stupid and/or mean. Can't we tell stories about good and smart people? Those stories exist, but they're depressingly rare.
I have ways of turning Shakespeare's text into a story that I think you will want to hear. Or at least, trying to. It's the hard part of my job as an artist.
> I've got only limited patience for people being stupid and/or mean. Can't we tell stories about good and smart people? Those stories exist, but they're depressingly rare.
I don't think there are good or bad people. Every person contains both within them.
Oh gosh I feel the exact opposite. Of the Tolstoy books I've read I don't think any of his characters are martyrs as one might expect "someone too good is" but you see examples of people thoughtfully trying to helping others and it paying off, while others who thoughtless do it end up, uh, not so great.
I guess I don't consider myself as much an expert on Shakespeare to critique his side though.
"... nevertheless I will endeavor, as well as I can, to show why I believe that Shakespeare can not be recognized either as a great genius, or even as an average author."
Shakespeare isn't even an average author? Who knew Tolstoy was a grade A hater. Tolstoy is like a hater trying to convince you that Brady is an overrated below average system quarterback who lucked out in NE.
I think Tolstoy missed where much of Shakespeare's greatness lay - his use and command of the english language. Not just coining words, but how he said so much with so little. Brevity is the soul of wit. Tolstoy seemed oddly focused on the morals and realism of shakespeare's works.
My guess is that it was a language barrier. No matter how "fluent" Tolstoy was in english, it's hard to appreciate word play if english isn't your native language.
But man, tolstoy would have loved social media. He would have fit right in. Haters for life.
To add to the Tolstoy connections being accounted here: in Knut Hamsun’s novel Mysteries there’s a page long diatribe by the protagonist ripping Tolstoy a new one for his incessant moralizing. It’s quite fun.
In the source material (Geoffrey of Monmouth), Cordelia successfully rescues Lear and secures a dignified life for him. So something had to make him change the story.
Shakespeare had some plays that had at least tragic elements--Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale. Maybe The Tempest.--with happy or happyish endings. But he mostly didn't do "Hollywood Endings" on his tragedies. So the something may simply have been "great source material but that ending has to go."
The first three plays you mention are rarely performed, and for good reason: they're kind of a mess. Not everything fits neatly into Comedy/Tragedy/History, but his most widely regarded plays were all tragedies where everybody ends up dead. It's a trope he wrote well.
So I concur with you. I haven't read the original King Leir, but I have read Nahum Tate's happy-ending rewrite of Shakespeare, and the ending just reads false.
Yes. Of those 4, only The Tempest is top-drawer Shakespeare although, to be honest, The Winter's Tale is the only one of the other three I've actually read/seen performed.
The Tempest--which is one of my favorites--was one of his very last plays and certainly his last great one; it's hard not to see the ending, e.g. the breaking of the staff, as symbolic in a way that his other play conclusions were not.
>his most widely regarded plays
I guess I agree. Comedy doesn't get a lot of love at the Oscars either. I certainly appreciate plays like A Midsummer Night's Dream. But I have admit a lot of the gender-switching and mistaken identities in many of his comedies tend to blend together for me after a while.
My theater troupe (www.rudemechanicals.com) has never done Cymbelline -- the only play we haven't done. We had it on our schedule to be performed next month, but obviously that didn't happen.
I directed Pericles myself, and it was actually a hoot, albeit with a cheat. The plot is such a mess that I literally put the two writers, Shakespeare and Wilkins, on stage, and pretended that the play's bizarre plot twists were the result of the two fighting over control.
Our Winter's Tale was less of a farce. We set it in the 1960s, with the Bohemians as "bohemians". It was lovely -- still not anybody's favorite Shakespeare play, but a worthy project.
We're doing Zoom shows to keep ourselves occupied until we can get back on stage. And when we do I'll finally get to do a version of Midsummer I've been prepping for years, lit mostly with black lights. It'll be beautiful. (I've directed it twice before, and my troupe has done it several other times as well. Audiences do love that play.)
Midsummer is great. And, yes, it offers a lot of opportunities for interpretation that I've appreciated over the years. I'm sure your version will be a lot of fun. Good luck!
> directed Pericles myself, and it was actually a hoot, albeit with a cheat. The plot is such a mess that I literally put the two writers, Shakespeare and Wilkins, on stage, and pretended that the play's bizarre plot twists were the result of the two fighting over control.
Love this!
>We set it in the 1960s
One of the things I've come to appreciate as I've seen more Shakespeare and, perhaps, gotten older is that I better appreciate alternative settings and interpretation rather than wanting the "authentic" version. One favorite of mine a few years ago was that Bedlam out of Brooklyn did two completely different versions of Twelfth Night.
Well, the plots are really bad, even by Shakespeare's standards. Cymbelline is a mess of mistaken identities and increasingly arbitrary subplots that require a literal deus ex machina to resolve: Jupiter himself shows up and just tells everybody how to end the play. Pericles started life as a collection of unrelated short stories, crammed together haphazardly. The Winter's Tale has a terrible main character, so the plot just goes completely elsewhere for 17 years, followed by a completely unmotivated and really bizarre quickie "redemption". In each case you leave the theater having no idea how to feel about anything. They weren't funny, but neither have they resolved dramatically. They just kinda stop.
That said... two of the films I mentioned are of plays considered barely better than these. Titus is literally a horror play, but Julie Taymor was the director of the Broadway Lion King, and turned it into achingly beautiful and horribly tragic art. The Coriolanus is less of an artistic achievement, but they resolved the play's terrible pacing problems to make it a thrilling political action movie.
The real reason the plays I listed are rarely performed isn't the plot, but the fact that there isn't anything else great to recommend them. They don't have great poetry or engaging characters. They're just kinda limp.
But who knows? Maybe they just need somebody to find the magic in them. A couple of years ago I had a wild success with a production of Timon of Athens, a kind of reverse Chrismas Carol where the Scrooge starts off as a good, generous man who spends the whole second half of the play complaining about how badly he got screwed over. Then he kills himself. I edited it to keep the pace up, found the dark comedy in it, and people said that they didn't know why it's not performed more often.
So any of these plays could have a great rediscovery at some point and change how people think about them. But we're also very aware that even the best of Shakespeare's plays have deep flaws, both intrinsically and in the way expectations have changed in 400 years. We find that they mean something to us, and even the terrible ones contain something that adds to the work as a whole. I can report what most people think, but the real wins come when somebody takes a fresh look.
Thanks for your perspective and the wonderfully detailed response. That's quite interesting about Julie Taymor. I wish I would have been able to see that and now I'm curious to read a review. Do you have some online Shakespeare resources that you cold recommend for reading more about these types of elements discussions of Shakespeares works and career arc?
Note: the assertion that the experience of plague caused Shakespeare to change the ending of King Lear is really just speculation by one scholar. The evidence is circumstantial in the extreme.
We know rather little about Shakespeare’s biography or inner life, and after two centuries of people combing over every scrap of archival evidence they can find we are not likely to discover much more. Which is fine by me really - just read the plays! But it doesn’t prevent these kinds of rather clickbaity claims to have uncovered something.
I'm by no means a Shakespearean scholar but, in the context of his many earlier tragedies, wouldn't Lear with a happy ending have been something of an outlier?
The play that Lear was based off of had a happy ending, and Shakespeare had obviously written things that were not tragedies, but yes if he said this one's a tragedy you were guaranteed lots of death and misery.
But with some exceptions (perhaps most notably his late The Tempest), the elements of his plays mostly categorize them as either tragedies or comedies. Not to suggest there's no ambiguity though and certainly the fact that the source material differed from his play does at least raise some question.
I don't think a plain English adaptation is very helpful. His work isn't about the story, but the language. The work is poetry, both literally and figuratively, and a plain English adaptation is like somebody telling you about their favorite song.
Better, I think, is to see a good film adaptation. Shakespeare was never intended to be read, but to be performed. There's a lot in the text that isn't apparent until you've studied it closely, but a good performance will bring it right out in the open.
These are all good, accessible versions of his plays. You don't need to be an expert to understand and enjoy them. (They're very roughly in order of my favorites, if that matters to you.)
I won't guarantee you'll like them. There's really nothing wrong with that. People get snobby about Shakespeare, and they shouldn't. It's OK to say, "Yeah, it's not for me". But under all the snobbery, there really is great text and great performances that people genuinely enjoy. If you're interested in that, these films are the places I'd start.
Agreed. It's perfectly fine if you don't get all the mythological and historical allusions when you're watching a Shakespearian play. Just let the language wash over you. By all means, if it's your thing study it afterwords but I'd definitely start with a good performance rather than painfully work your way through an annotation that explains every reference in the text.
There are also tons of Macbeth productions, although the best is probably Polanski's which some will have an issue with.
I read some Shakespeare in class with a book that had translation notes on every page.. one page of play and one page of notes.. every page. The language is strange to everyone, which is part of what makes it "magical" sometimes ! It really is made to be performed, and often makes awkward reading I think. Lots of the drama is based on the personalities of the actors and actresses.. Some people make a show of learning the lines and shouting and such, which to me, is part of learning.. Plain language text in a book would lose almost all of that.. perhaps find a video to try?
Ignore anyone who may look down on using this. The “plain English” version is often redundant, and of course the language in the original has metre and sometimes rhyme (take a look at the opening of Macbeth: https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/macbeth/page_2...), but the “plain English” version is occasionally genuinely useful, and overall I find it valuable. Most of the time (at least after you get the hang of the language, if you haven't read anything from that period before) you'll be reading just the original, but having the “translation” right there can help.
I am seeing a trend recently of comparing the plague to covid 19 and it is rather frustrating. The case fatality rate of the black death was 30-60% pretty much across the board for the bubonic variant.
Covid 19 is 0.4% and really that is heavily skewed by those over the age of 70 and especially 80.
Covid 19, while enormously disruptive due to its infectiousness and tendency to put a big chunk of people in hospital, doesn't even begin to compare to what the plague did. Not far off of half of western Europe died. It was unimaginably catastrophic.
It's pertinent because people are not learning the biggest lesson of covid - this was nothing but a trial run for a serious pandemic. Bird flus can get up to the 40% mark or more and without the age variation.
The reality is if a black death like disease hit the modern world civilisation would likely more or less totally collapse.
The fact people are so incredibly lackadaisical about the origins of and behaviour around the outbreak not to mention any future efforts to at least reduce the odds of another novel virus pandemic seriously scares me.
One particularly crucial difference, I think, is public knowledge about diseases in general. During the plague, people were blaming every minority they could find. Can't really stop the spread of a disease if the extent of your knowledge of epidemiology is "God is punishing us because of you!". No "stay at home", no "wash your hands", no "don't cough on people".
We may have a disease that'll be just as lethal, but this time nearly everyone in the world knows the basics about diseases. The global response to COVID hasn't been particularly heartening, but I think that's because it's in that "sweet spot" (more like sour spot...) range where the fatality rate is low enough that many people are not sufficiently cautious and allow it to spread widely, but high enough that it does kill a lot of people.
If we someday have a much more serious disease, like with a black death fatality rate of 30%, I think it's likely to disappear very quickly unless it has an extremely long contagious incubation period. It might to do some serious damage at ground zero, but people will freak out and hide at home if a huge, visible percentage of people die. And this time, (I hope) people won't be running around pointing fingers and spreading the disease in the process.
How much of the black death date rate was due to lack of medical knowledge? Would we really have the same terrible outcome if a similar disease hit today?
Well, all of it was due to the lack of medical knowledge. The bubonic plague hardly kills anyone anymore. The point the parent is making is that we shouldn't compare the societal effects of COVID19 today with that of the bubonic plague when it was at its worst.
But his conclusion seems to have been: we need to worry about what happens if a disease like the black plague hits again: which, well, no we don't. If we need to worry about a future pandemic its one which is quite different the plauge and thus one we are defenseless against.
I believe the point was that we need to worry about a pandemic that is as bad as the black plague was, not that we just need to worry about that disease specifically. The OP even mentioned bird flus as one class that could cause similar devastation.
Why do you think that? We could work to improve our ability to rapidly develop vaccines and stockpile PPE. Those two things would go a long way. Analyzing our supply chains and finding critical points of failure would be another conceivable step.
ok, but then the crucial question becomes: are we likely to see that? I tend to think that those scenarios aren't possible anymore, but maybe I'm being overly optimistic.
Well, today we have antibiotics, so no, we do not have to fear the original black death anymore.
But what we also have today, to mitigate the bonus of medicine and hygiene, is fast global travel and very, very crowded cities, compared to the medieval times.
So a highly infectious and deadly disease, we can not treat with antibiotics, would still fuck us up pretty bad.
So I agree, covid was a good trial run for a real epidemic.
Supply chains on the middle ages were extremely short compared to ours. Good luck feeding a city of, say, 3-million people during a plague that's comparable to the Black Death.
I mean, mankind would probably soldier on, but civilization would take quite a hit.
>> The reality is if a black death like disease hit the modern world civilisation would likely more or less totally collapse.
Ehhh, depends what you mean by "like". The bubonic plague itself is not rare today; it is more or less expected in wild armadillos, for example. But it is not the calamitous disease to us that it was to medieval Europeans. Modern whites have seen a certain amount of selection for resistance to the plague.
> Why do believe that? It didn't collapse medieval European civilization.
On the other hand, I can't support this. The plague very much did collapse medieval European civilization; the accepted structure of society completely disintegrated. Wages for poor laborers skyrocketed. Panicked nobility passed new laws forbidding peasants from leaving the land they worked, and the peasants ignored them. The total loss of so much of the labor force meant that those who survived were much richer -- wheat fields didn't suffer from the plague! -- and radical adjustments to society followed quickly.
I was aware of those effects of the black death, but I guess I don't see it as a "collapse". Maybe I'm wrong or my definition of "collapse" is different from the one accepted by historians.
The nobility still remained the nobility for centuries afterward. The church retained most of its power for another century, until the reformation. Standards of living declined for some time but not that long. A collapse (to me) would have been rather more drastic.
I think we would have fewer deaths from a second black death than COVID. If the death rate is that high, people will be willing to go to drastic measures to contain it, and it is much easier to tell if someone is infected.
For example, look at how we have handled Ebola outbreaks - despite it being incredibly infectious and deadly, we've never had an outbreak kill even a fraction of the number COVID has.
Wow you got me thinking. 30-60% case fatality rate. Imagine living in those days after the disease was widespread and well known but not understood and one morning just feeing a little sick and you knew wow is this the end.
Also, the Betrothed (1827) by Alessandro Manzoni, which is set during the 1600s plague. In a very famous chapter, one of the characters finds out he's got the plague, which is pretty close to what the GP describes.
How I was amazed by the pace and energy of 'Betrothed', not one boring minute in all of its 700+ pages. The translation by Bruce Penman available from Penguin is an exhilarating read.
