OF A GOLDEN AGE

(Part 1 was my review of Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, a dissembled and reknitted telling of King Lear.)

The story of Lear digs way back, way way back, centuries before the version brought forth by Shakespeare. Back then he was Leir, one of the legendary ancient kings of Britain. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, Leir’s father Bladud was an adventuresome king who pursued magic and necromancy. He built a pair of wings which, Geoffrey explains, simply did not work. The king plummeted to an ugly death on ancient London’s temple to the god Apollo.

In contrast, Leir had sixty years of good times as King but his problems began when he decided to step aside, divide the kingdom betwixt his daughters, and travel among them in his retirement. Why someone with sixty years of absolute monarching under his belt was so subject to empty flattery, I can’t say — it speaks to the privileged relationship between fathers and daughters, or perhaps to the communication gap and mutual lack of understanding that can color the same relationship.

Shakespeare begins with the same framework: youngest Cordelia resists her older sisters’ examples of empty flattery, pragmatically assuring her father she feels exactly the appropriate levels of love, respect, and loyalty. He drives her out of the family and lets the older two inherit Britannia in halves. When the Earl of Kent supports Cordelia’s doubts and asks Lear to reconsider, the good king throws Kent out. Kent goes undercover and comes back to defend Lear from what he views as the inevitable attacks of the two oldest daughters.

In the meantime, another family drama plays out with the Earl of Gloucester and his sons Edgar and Edmund, one legitimate and one illegitimate. Edmund double-agents his way into Gloucester’s favor and gets his well-meaning brother Edgar thrown out. After that, Edmund turns on his father and has him arrested and effectively exiled. In the process, Gloucester is blinded and left to wander. Then people start to get killed.

Edgar is my favorite character in the play. When Gloucester turns him out as a traitor, Edgar smears mud on his face and in his hair, dresses up in rags, and plays a madman. This, Richard Hornby explains in the summer 2007 Hudson Review (PDF), adds to the play’s visceral engagement:

Yes, the play is sad — it is a tragedy, after all — and it presents a view of life as ultimately meaningless, but when I first read the ravings of Edgar as the pretend madman, I did not feel I was getting a philosophical message. [The ravings are] a shock wave to be experienced.

In fact, the vivid descriptions of Edgar’s faux madness and Lear’s incubating, very real madness stand side by side and intensify the impact of each. As Lear’s daughters treat him more and more badly, you can see it confusing him to the point that it breaks his mind: The oldest daughters belittle and mock his retirement plan into oblivion. They kill Lear from the brain outward by instantly becoming people he never expected to find where his family once had been.

In contrast, Edgar’s manufactured crazy helps him to pass invisibly through a world in which he’s no longer welcome and monitor the behaviors of the people he still cares about, including his father. After exiling Edgar himself, Gloucester is also ousted. Blind Gloucester is left to wander the countryside and Edgar finds him, saves him, in the play’s most serious and eloquent moment. Edgar is a decent, empathetic, and sincere human being. I felt satisfied at the end of the play because he was rewarded, in a way, for his quiet but critical acts of kindness.

For the eponymous exiled king, we find a champion in the form of youngest daughter Cordelia along with her husband, the king of France. But of course, it being a tragedy and all, very few characters emerge unscathed. In fact, there is mild to moderate scathing for even those left less dead at the end.

I love the following passage from Roger Ebert’s review of the 1971 movie version of Lear because it explains how I felt about Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and the original Lear:

He omits or rearranges dialogue and scenes in order to make the evil daughters, Regan and Goneril, ambiguous in their villainy. He gives us a Cordelia who is not as perfect as she should be. He gives us a Lear who is only a figure of pity, not (as he was in Shakespeare) also sometimes a figure of greatness. He gives us a world so grim we might as well be dead.

Ebert criticizes the movie’s (male) maker for his choices, but I don’t hold any ill will for Smiley’s creative license. Her rewrites don’t bear out badly in the updated version of the story; they wantonly alter its tone to unrecognizability. This is testament both to the power of Shakespeare’s play and Smiley’s place as a profoundly gifted contemporary writer. I also give her major credit for using her source material graciously and simply: to frame her own story, tell a side she felt was not represented, satisfy her own creative itch by building on Shakespeare without presumption or pretension.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

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