ૺ%XW,WVWKH6WRU\:H/LNHૻ.LQJ/HDUIRU&KLOGUHQ )URP'UDPDWR1DUUDWLYH Laura Tosi
Children's Literature, Volume 42, 2014, pp. 246-274 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\7KH-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/chl.2014.0021
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246 Laura Tosi “But It’s the Story We Like”—King Lear for Children: From Drama to Narrative
Laura Tosi
Locked inside the plays are some of the most exciting stories ever told: some romantic, some tragic, some comic, but all full of interesting people. . . . One of the best ways to learn about these wonderful plays is to get someone to tell you the stories hidden away inside them, the framework or skeletons that the poetry and the people who speak it are fastened to. —Bernard Miles, Favorite Tales from Shakespeare 8 In truth it was not easy to arrange the story simply. Even with the recollection of Lamb’s tales to help me I found it hard to tell the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” in words that these little ones could understand. But presently I began the tale, and then the words came fast enough. When the story was ended, Iris drew a long breath. “It is a lovely story,” she said; “but it doesn’t look at all like that in the book.” “It is only put differently,” I answered. “You will understand when you grow up that the stories are the least part of Shakespeare.” “But it’s the stories we like,” said Rosamund. —Edith Nesbit, Preface to The Best of Shakespeare 8–9 These quotations from two adaptors of Shakespeare for children, Bernard Miles and Edith Nesbit, highlight the inescapable fact that the history of adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays for young audiences is very much a tale of drama turned into narrative, with the same story abridged, distilled, or expanded into the different plot of each adaptation (see Marchitello). In Nesbit’s preface, we find the author besieged by children who are as baffled by Shakespeare’s language as they are enchanted by his plots, while Miles sees the plots hidden in the plays, ready to be “uncovered” for the children’s sake. The process of transposing a mimetic mode into a diegetic mode has a powerful impact on time–place coordinates, character, and setting presentation as well as perspective. An omniscient narrator is introduced, who generally simplifies complex issues and intrudes with comments and interpretations. With children’s adaptations (I am using this term in the sense described by Linda Hutcheon, as “both a product 246
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and a process of creation and reception” [xiv]), added explanations and attempts at ideological reorientations of the plays in educational terms are all the more significant, as in most cases the adaptation is accessed before the source is read or experienced at the theater. This may be interpreted as a challenge to the notion of the priority or authority of the “original” (Hutcheon xiii), although, of course, adaptations of such canonical works as King Lear can rely on a general (albeit vague) cultural awareness of the text by the general public, though probably experienced more by adults than by children. However, while adaptations do not always need to be compared to source texts in order to be enjoyed, especially where there is no parodic intent—as in televised versions of Victorian novels, for example—since the nineteenth century, authors of Shakespeare adaptations have been concerned with the universality of the Bard’s “values” and art, and the cultural capital that children can accumulate for their future education as they are introduced to his work. An early interest in Shakespeare’s “stories” is testified to in eighteenth-century chapbooks (see Ziegler), which may have been inspired by the ballads which preceded them (Richmond 9–10); reading selected passages and scenes and the use of toy theaters were other ways in which Shakespeare’s plays were disseminated among the young. In the second half of the nineteenth century, knowledge of these plays became a subject for examination (first in 1855, for the Indian Civil Service), and then part of the curriculum when schooling became compulsory in 1870. This is probably the reason why, after the many reprints of the Lambs’ Tales, most collections of prose tales taken from Shakespeare are concentrated in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Finding entertaining ways to introduce children to the plays evidently became paramount in those years, as most of these collections were given as prizes in school examinations. Another wave of interest in rewriting Shakespeare plays appears to have started in the 1960s and is continuing now, with several examples of visual Shakespeare (manga and comics), novels, and movies especially geared toward teenagers in which the plays are presented in contemporary settings, looking at connections between Elizabethan and contemporary constructions of young adulthood. In this essay, I shall be considering prose narrative versions of King Lear for children, from the first narrative rendition of the play in English, by Charles Lamb (1807), to Marcia Williams’s version published in 2000. (As I am particularly interested in the way plot and subplot
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interact in the play and in narrative retellings, I will not consider examples of visual Shakespeare, such as manga, or cinematic texts.) Lear, like the rest of the tragedies, is not the most obvious choice for prose rewritings: plays such as The Tempest or A Midsummer Night’s Dream (with fairies and romance) are more commonly found in tale collections. There is no “Cordelia’s tale” in Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850–52), for example; nor does the play appear in other collections, like G. B. Harrison’s (1938) and Miles’s (1976), or in the most recent Usborne Stories from Shakespeare, by Anna Claybourne (2004). This is not unusual, as selections for children tend to establish an alternate Shakespeare canon which is different from the “adult” canon; King Lear lags behind Hamlet and Macbeth in collected editions, and its position in this canon is less secure than that of the comedies—another reason for the occasional temporal gaps between the texts I examine in this essay. King Lear is obviously a difficult play to adapt for a young audience, but a prose version able to rely on the narrator’s guidance can help the reader understand the way this play explores the mutual obligations of father and daughters, and sibling rivalry is as crucial in the play as it is in several fairy tales of the Western canon. In this essay I argue that these narratives, even if often discreetly and often unwittingly, offer different angles from which to look at family interactions and obligations as well as personal responsibility. By looking at Lear and intervening in the interaction between the two plots—both having to do with strained parent–children relationships—adaptors stress that family relations in the play can hardly qualify as exemplary, and implicitly (sometimes explicitly) point to errors of judgment and behavior in family interactions. With the exception of William Hooks’s Moss Gown (1987), a single story inspired by the tragedy, these adaptations are all to be found in collections of narrative versions of Shakespeare which, unlike Clarke’s mid-nineteenth-century novellas and several present-day young adult novels, do not expand the plot in novel-like form. Apart from two retellings that rely more substantially on the structure of the fairy tale and end happily, these adaptations neither challenge Shakespeare’s meanings nor supplement them with creative material; in general, they are less likely to perform the acts of radical cultural appropriation that tend to be found in expanded versions. Although some of these adaptations provide some basic background information on Lear’s family, they very rarely go so far as to provide prequels to the play. Authors may occasionally take very brief “inferential walks,” to use Umberto
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Eco’s phrase (204), into the characters’ past, but never in the way that is characteristic of critics like A. C. Bradley, who discusses Shakespeare’s characters as if they were real people.1 Most of these texts would be considered very conservative and substantially close to Shakespeare’s play, as, with the exceptions mentioned above, they don’t introduce new characters or incidents—they follow the basic plot of King Lear. But do they? I am particularly interested in examining abridgement (or rearrangement) of plot sections and elimination of characters: these operations, which do not alter the so-called basic plot, are nevertheless very revealing of the way the adapted texts remove the play’s ambiguities regarding attitudes to paternal authority and filial duty, constructions of femininity, and political rule. Even if one can easily agree with Douglas Lanier that in the nineteenth century Shakespeare “becomes a focus of disciplinary forces concerned with controlling and transforming traditional popular recreations regarded as potential threats to the social order” (36), turning King Lear into a narrative for children cannot simply have been a way to socialize them into bourgeois values. Folktale Sources Prose versions of Shakespeare’s plays for children were at the peak of their popularity at the same time that England was experiencing an unprecedented flowering of the literary fairy tale for children: as Manlove reports, “The fairy tale became the dominant form of Victorian fantasy” (166; see also Zipes). Thanks to the Romantic movement and the impulse given by continental translations, the Victorians and Edwardians were exceptionally prolific fairy tale writers, and young readers of fairy tales and Shakespeare’s adaptations often enjoyed a common visual experience, for artists such as George Cruikshank and Charles Folkard illustrated editions of both. Thus it should not come as a complete surprise that these adaptations of Shakespeare, more or less overtly, on occasion appropriate some of the characteristics of fairy tales: a clear-cut division between good and bad characters; a strong narratorial (often patronizing) voice; or even—in rare cases—a revised happy ending. In adaptations for children, Shakespeare’s ending is largely preferred over Nahum Tate’s eighteenth-century revised version, with the exception of Jean Baptiste Perrin’s Contes Moraux amusans & instructifs à l’usage de la jeunesse. Tirés des tragédies de Shakespeare (London, 1783), which retains Tate’s theatrical interpolated characters like the
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maid Arante, and incidents like Edmund’s attempted rape of Cordelia. An English adaptation of Lear partially attributable to Tate’s version is Joseph Graves’s, collected in book form in 1840. In this version Cordelia is in love with Edgar and is, therefore, unhappy with Lear arranging her marriage. In the end she is killed as in Shakespeare, leaving Edgar to rule as an inconsolable “widower”: “he never afterwards formed any attachment; but devoted the remainder of his days in sorrow and mourning” (122). As Laurie Osborne puts it, “the use of narrative to lure young readers” (116) is not exclusive to contemporary young adult fiction, but, from the Lambs onward, was obviously a way to ensure that the approach to Shakespeare’s drama should happen in a mediated form that would still be acceptable to parents and teachers. King Lear is an interesting case study in narrative (together with Hamlet, but for different reasons2); even as drama, this play is characterized by the unlocalized setting and vague “pastness” of folktale, where characters, as the folklorist Max Lüthi writes, “lack any relation to past and future, to time altogether” (11). It is as if we could catch a glimpse, under the veil of mediating written sources and topical allusions, of a residual folktale atmosphere. As Janet Adelman has put it: However foreign the setting, however motiveless the actions, these events are familiar to us: familiar from our childhood, when we knew all about the three daughters and knew that the scorned youngest was the best. The opening of King Lear, with its elements of fairy tale, thus has its roots in the memories of our childhood and the knowledge we had then. (6) It is possibly because of this “familiarity” that adaptations of King Lear normally require fewer narratorial interventions explaining cultural differences than those of, for instance, The Merchant of Venice. Critics have long identified the folktale analog for King Lear, although Shakespeare may have come across it through the mediation of other (non-narrative) written sources, like The Faerie Queene or the anonymous earlier play Leir (1605). The first scene in particular, with the love test, has been recognized as attributable to what is now classified in the Aarne-Thompson folktale type Index as tale-type 510B (“Love Like Salt” / “Cap o’ Rushes”), similar to “Catskin” and to its twin “Cinderella” tale-type 510A. The “Love Like Salt” / “Cap o’ Rushes” version (for quotations I am referring to Joseph Jacobs’s written version of 1898) has the Cinderella figure giving an unsuitable as well as obscure reply
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to her father’s required public profession of love (“I love you as fresh meat loves salt” [52]), and being cast out as a consequence. The story follows the fate of the girl, who, hidden under a cloak made of rushes, finds employment as a scullery maid in a great house (“she stayed there and washed the pots and scraped the saucepans and did all the dirty work” [52]), until she marries the master’s son. At the wedding feast, where the estranged daughter orders the cooks to “dress every dish without a mite of salt” (56), she reveals herself and is reunited with her father, but only after he has realized “his terrible mistake.” In Jacobs’s version there is a happy ending, in which the youngest daughter’s virtue is typically rewarded. As has been noted (see Imbrie), Shakespeare’s play focuses exclusively, and uncharacteristically, on the parent’s story—the father’s part, as it were—and on his conflicts and suffering: even if compared to the Leir play, Cordelia’s presence is remarkably scant. She speaks a little more than a hundred lines in four scenes out of twenty-six, and “is reduced to a supporting character in her father’s story” (Skura 125). Incidentally, Leir is the only source, together with the folktale in whatever form Shakespeare may have had access to, that has an unequivocally happy ending—unlike other source texts, which tell what happened after Lear and Cordelia’s reconciliation: namely, civil war and Cordelia’s suicide in prison. Tate would later restore this fairy-tale ending, though for reasons other than a desire to be faithful to folktale tradition, as poetic justice was an important requirement of Restoration adaptations. As Catherine Belsey has observed, “the dead Cordelia in her father’s arms is precisely not the ending promised by the folktale beginning of the play. . . . King Lear follows the first three phases of the folk tale, but withholds the last” (50, 53; original emphasis). Folktale analogs in the “Cinderella” group of related stories, which appears to have its origin in ninth-century China (see Brewer), also include the “Catskin” subtype, in which the father develops an incestuous passion for his daughter. Alan Dundes’s psychoanalytic reading of the play is largely based on the assumption that the “love like salt” plot may well be a weakened form of the folktale type involving incest. Although Dundes’s article continues with a discussion of projection, ultimately offering an interpretation that has Cordelia entertaining amorous feelings for her father, a number of critics have detected incestuous undercurrents in Lear’s attitudes, or at least have pointed out that Lear’s withdrawal of Cordelia’s marriage dowry is a sign of his reluctance to part with her (Boose). The incest subtext has notably been
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taken up by Jane Smiley in A Thousand Acres (1991), and provides the motivation for Goneril and Regan’s cruelty toward their father. Motivation is a key issue in adaptations of King Lear: in the play, besides the sisters’ inexplicable behavior with their father, Cordelia’s response may sound enigmatic especially if compared with Cordella’s predicament in Leir: namely, her opposition to her father’s plans for an arranged marriage. As Lynne Bradley has argued, “At the same time that Shakespeare adds complexity and the dimension of growth to his characters, he excises background and motivation from their actions” (17). In the same vein, Stephen Greenblatt argues that in Shakespeare’s last plays (Othello, Macbeth, King Lear), by deliberately withdrawing motivation, the dramatist created a “strategic opacity” that “released an enormous energy that had been at least partially blocked or contained by familiar, reassuring explanations” (324). If, as has been observed, King Lear appears to incorporate and resist the folktale mode in several ways, reappropriating and accommodating some features of the traditional tale (whether in the oral or written form, its linear monological narrative contrasts with the dialogical theatrical form), the play is also connected to the real history of Britain and its origin myths, so that topical allusions to the reunion of the Crowns of England and Scotland as a counterpoint to Lear’s division of his kingdom cannot be ignored (see Dutton). Meredith Skura has noted that by giving Edgar kingship instead of Cordelia (as in the sources), “Shakespeare achieves for Britain what Edgar has done for himself. He makes his ghosts into ancestors, and moves from myth into history, from Faerieland to England” (141). It would be somehow naïve to expect prose retellings to take King Lear back to Fairyland, especially because narrative versions of the play can’t help being loaded with the baggage of its Elizabethan (or Jacobean) associations. Prose versions for children, very often at the expense of complexity, make a definite attempt to add motivations in order to dispel the opacity that hangs over the characters, fleshing out Cordelia and opposing her to the “evil sisters” in a way that recalls the fairy tale mode of character presentation—and, not unusually, letting go of the subplot in the process. As they dwell on the reasons and consequences of that first scene and focus on the fate of the father and the wicked daughters, the early adaptations in particular tend to marginalize the other dysfunctional family of the play, the one not connected to the folktale source.
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Eliminating the Subplot In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the subplot offers more explicit explanations and motivations for analogous behaviors. For example, Goneril and Regan’s jealousy of their father’s love for their sister is possibly displaced onto Edmund’s jealousy of his brother voiced in Act 1, scene 2, while in the play the sisters are rivals for Edmund’s love (see Perkinson); similarly, the point can be made that their hatred for Lear is displaced onto Gloucester, whom Regan appears to torture with relish. If we agree that the play’s subplot attempts to exhaust the dramatic and psychological possibilities that its main plot leaves unexplored or unexplained, then reabsorbing the subplot into the main plot may mean that narrative versions tend to harp unambiguously (and uniquely) on Lear’s daughters and their wickedness. The competition between the brothers is, again, saddled on Lear and his daughters, which brings the adaptations closer to nineteenth-century versions of “Cinderella” like the Grimms’, translated into English in 1823 by Edward Taylor. In this very popular version, the “good” daughter (the father’s only biological one), mistreated, destitute, and marginalized “by the hearth among the ashes” (Grimm and Grimm 194), is contrasted with her evil stepsisters. In narrative versions for children, there is no ambivalence in the description of Goneril and Regan, who are unquestionably bad, in the way fairy-tale characters are bad, by their very nature and for no particular reason. Without Edmund to balance the sisters’ evil—even if Shakespeare’s play does treat him differently from the way it treats them (Thompson 123)—their wickedness appears even more barbarous and phenomenal than it does in the play, which fiercely resists a feminist revaluation of the bad daughters unless, as in A Thousand Acres, some extratextual information is provided. Yet Lear does curse Goneril in the most unforgivable way, only because she wishes him to reduce his knights by half; onstage, Goneril’s reaction to the curse (from astonishment to tears or physical collapse) can be used to good effect to highlight her father’s unnatural behavior. One of the interpretive dilemmas all these adaptations address is that of personal responsibility: sisters apart, to what degree can we hold King Lear accountable? Or Cordelia, with her “stubborn” silence? The issue of fatherly authority and obedience (or “duty,” a very typical Victorian word which in a number of adaptations replaces the word “bond” in Cordelia’s speech) in texts directed to a young audience is crucial, as should be expected. Cordelia, the daughter who refuses to be compli-
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ant, is more central in these heavily abridged prose versions in which the first scene has pride of place, and takes proportionally more space than in the playtext. In nineteenth-century criticism Cordelia is more admired than sympathized with: Hazlitt (1817) writes that she has “a little of her father’s obstinacy” (109); Anna Jameson, in her influential Characteristics of Women (1832), compares her to a Madonna in an Italian painting and praises her near-perfection, but cannot help remarking that if it weren’t for Shakespeare’s poetical conception, “this deliberate coolness would strike us as verging on harshness or obstinacy” (101). To Henrietta Lee Palmer, who includes Cordelia in her Stratford Gallery, or the Shakespeare Sisterhood (1859), following Jameson in female character study, she is almost too good to be true: . . . we confess that Cordelia presents to us few points of congeniality on which we may freely hang a familiar preference . . . for we feel that to be capable of worthily understanding and loving her, one must possess virtue as heroic, a heart as pure, and a conscience as void of offense, as her own. (230) Janet Bottoms has discussed how, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Cordelia was turned into a heroine in narrative versions that emphasized her devotion to her father, though without completely erasing references to obstinacy or pride.3 Bottoms concludes that the character of Cordelia is “too radically discontinuous” (113) to allow a satisfactory filling of the gaps. However, in these versions an unquestionably “good” Cordelia is often required, in order to highlight the misuse of paternal as well as political authority, which is linked to the issue of personal responsibility. Most of these adaptations hold the stance that absolute authority can be resisted, but only by a morally outstanding subject—it is no coincidence that Kent, unlike Gloucester, is one of the characters who is never abridged. As we take a closer look at the selection of prose retellings, a prime factor to be considered is that motivations are accorded to characters essentially through a wide use of descriptors. In Lamb’s adaptation (1807), a character tends to be introduced with a “label” that immediately clarifies to the reader some of its more typical moral traits. So “this poor king,” “the old king” (117), contrasts with “the hated Goneril,” “two wicked daughters” (116), or “the bad earl of Gloucester” (121). Lamb’s version is more ambiguous about Lear’s personal responsibility than are later texts; this is generally effected through the appropriation of King Lear’s words by the narrator’s authoritative voice. For example,
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Lear’s defense of his retinue (“My train are men of choice and rarest parts that all particular of duty know” [1.4.264]), which in performance is often visually as well as aurally counterpointed by the knights’ riotous behavior, becomes a statement of fact in the narrator’s description: “by far the hundred knights were all men of choice behaviour and sobriety of manners, skilled in all particulars of duty, and not given to rioting or feasting as she said” (114). Embracing Lear’s perspective on events and incorporating it within the narration has the effect of justifying the king’s decision to set the love test and bestow his lands on the basis of declarations of affection, as it is taken “in a fit of fatherly fondness” (109), “so little guarded by reason and so much by passion” (110). Lear, “the foolish-fond father” (110), appears to be blinded by too much affection for his daughters. The narrator comments on the “devilish disposition” (112) of “these cruel daughters” (119), who try to outdo each other “in unfilial behaviour . . . as if they strove to exceed each other in cruelty” (116), a behavior that reveals what was lurking behind their proficiency in the initial love competition. The Lambs are the first to abridge the subplot to a paragraph, which mentions Gloucester only in passing as “the late earl” and introduces Edmund as the contended love object of the daughters, who, having been untrue to their father, “could not be expected to prove more faithful to their own husbands” (120). Edmund is presented as a “wicked man, and a fit object for the love of such wicked creatures as Goneril and Regan” (120). As will happen in later adaptations, Edmund’s ruthless plotting against his father and brother is removed, and he is retained only in the capacity of double-dealing lover in the Lear plot, reinforcing the “wicked daughters” motif which culminates in their “deserved deaths” (121). The ending shows Cordelia as an “illustrious example of filial duty” (121), whom her father could not survive—not to forget Kent, who “soon followed him to the grave” (121). Everything else is given in a short summary in which the narrator quite explicitly declares that there is no need to report the story of Albany, “who ascended the throne of Britain after the death of Lear” (Edgar is only briefly mentioned as the disinherited son), “Lear and his Three Daughters being dead, whose adventures alone concern our story” (122). The Lambs and Their Followers The history of the relationship between adaptations of King Lear for children and narrative starts officially with the Lambs. It is no coinci-
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dence that Charles Lamb’s dissatisfaction with styles of performance of his time, and his belief that Shakespeare’s plays were incompatible with stage representation (expounded in his famous essay of 18114), use King Lear as an example of the impossibility of staging this tragedy and doing justice to Shakespeare: . . . to see Lear acted,—to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. . . . On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage: while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,—we are in his mind. (31–32) The best way to recreate Lear in our minds, and to enter into this abstract, intellectual process of identification with the play and its characters is, quite simply, to read it. With the Tales Charles and Mary Lamb provided a facilitated reading experience which would have the children reimagine the plays as linear narrative. Even if their joint enterprise (Charles rewrote the tragedies, Mary adapted the comedies) was prompted more by financial considerations than by purely creative impulse, turning the plays into short stories had obviously to do with an idea of narrative which would encourage a form of private interaction with the text and active use of the imagination. Many of Shakespeare’s sources are, in fact, narrative (novellas, folktales, chronicles), so the Lambs were the first of many adaptors to go in the opposite direction: from prose into drama, possibly back to something that could, at least in theory, resemble the “original” story. This seems to have been Bernard Miles’s own ambition: “In this book I have taken five of his most exciting plays and tried to turn them back into the kind of stories he started out with” (8; unfortunately, Miles does not include King Lear in his collection). The two Victorian Lears of my selection—by Abby Sage Richardson (1871), a writer and actress from New England; and Mary Seymour (1893), author of possibly the most extensive collection of the period, with twenty-six plays retold in a small Classic Stories Simply Told series published by the Scottish Evangelical Thomas Nelson—follow Lamb in drastically reducing the subplot, thus erasing the connections between these stories of misjudging fathers and cast-out children. Seymour’s version eliminates the subplot altogether. In both versions the word “duty” is used as a replacement for “bond” in Cordelia’s speech; in Seymour she “quietly declared that she loved her father according to her duty” (126), while in Richardson’s “The Story of
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King Lear and His Three Daughters” Cordelia thinks it is “her duty to give him [her future husband] half her love and care” (180; original emphasis). Richardson’s version could be renamed “The Pernicious Effects of a Bad Temper,” as Lear and his daughters pay dearly for their “fits of rage” (176). After Cordelia’s failure to deliver a loving speech, Lear “stamped and raved,” while Goneril “for a few days . . . disguised her wicked temper” (181) before losing it after “his men . . . had been a little noisy in one of the courtyards” (181). In Richardson there is no Edgar (no mention is made of who will be king after Lear) and, as in Lamb, Edmund is introduced as the love interest of the sisters, who, as in the earlier play Leir, “had formed a plot to have their old fellow murdered” (186). This adaptation is definitely a family drama revolving around sibling rivalry, with very limited political undertones; the fairy tale atmosphere is introduced through a “Cinderella”-like prequel in which the sisters are introduced as “proud and haughty beauties” (177) contrasted with the “meek and gentle” Cordelia. The contrast is also reinforced by the physical difference, the sisters being dark with “radiant black eyes” and Cordelia “blue-eyed” and “golden-haired.” But for all the elder sisters’ external beauty, “when any story of suffering or complaint of wrong arose from the people, they always took the part of the oppressor” (176–77), and Goneril and Regan disliked their younger sister “as ugly spirits always dislike that which is pure and beautiful” (177). The beautiful outside / ugly within pattern is typical of the Grimms’ “Cinderella,” with which both adaptor and readers would have been more familiar than with the “Cap o’ Rushes” folktale (which, incidentally, is unconcerned about the sisters’ fate after the love test): “They were fair in face, but foul at heart, and it was . . . a sorry time for the poor little girl” (Grimm and Grimm 193). In Richardson’s version, Lear cursing Goneril appears entirely justified, as the curse should bring the daughter’s immediate repentance: Surely such Nature could not produce another monster as she. When she answered this more bitter insult, he cursed her with a curse so terrible, that one can hardly imagine how she could have heard it and not fallen on her knees and called on God for mercy. (182) Mary Macleod, a later adaptor, had published ballads, stories from the Faerie Queene, and Arthurian romances before handling Shakespeare. Her early Edwardian version of King Lear (1902), like Richardson’s, denounces Lear’s unreasonable behavior, “always rash and headstrong,
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even in his best days, old age and infirmities had rendered him still more unruly and wayward, and his fits of unreasoning anger were often beyond control” (223). The narrator holds him responsible for the tragic events: “And so, with all his faults and follies, which had assuredly wrought out their own bitter retribution, the fiery-hearted King passed into the realm of eternal rest” (237; my emphasis). There is no subplot as such, so Cordelia returns immediately after the storm. Edmund is first introduced as the commander of the British troops of Goneril and Regan and is described as “a treacherous son of the loyal Earl of Gloucester” (235), although the text is expunged of Edmund’s plotting against his father the duke of Cornwall “finding out the part he [Gloucester] had played in the escape of Lear” (233) from no particular source; the reason for Edmund’s treachery is not provided. Later, his presence is limited to causing the sisters to enter a competition for his love: “an angry discussion now arose between the two sisters. Goneril also had taken a fancy to this Edmund, and had not scrupled to lay a plot to get her husband killed” (235). Edgar, again, appears for the first time when he challenges his brother to a combat as Edmund’s “brave half-brother” (236). As the subplot is drastically reduced, the wickedness of the sisters is emphasized: “When the kingdom was safely in their possession, their true natures became apparent, and they showed themselves what they really were—false, cruel, and utterly heartless women” (226), And, of course, their deaths appear to be thoroughly deserved: “Thus miserably perished these two hard-hearted and wicked women” (236). A fairy tale element is provided by Macleod’s emphasizing the “chivalrous” nature of the king of France, who behaves like a gallant prince, gladly raising destitute Cordelia to queenhood: “The King’s manly and chivalrous words fell like balm on the poor young girl’s wounded heart” (225). This attitude is also found in the adaptation written by Jeanie Lang (1910), who was Andrew Lang’s sister-in-law and a writer of nursery stories. In her Lear, there is a fairy tale sharp polarization between the elder sisters and Cordelia, who, it is specified, “was the one Lear loved the best, was not married, and stayed with her father in his palace” (67). The sisters are always described as “wicked,” especially Goneril: “every cruel, hurtful thing she could do to her father, this wicked daughter did” (73; Lear’s curse is cut). It is explicitly written that “Cordelia, instead of being a rich princess, was now no richer than a beggar girl” (71–72); however, the potential riches-to-rags plot is immediately reversed to normality by the king of France’s proposal. In this version there is hardly a subplot, with no personal names pro-
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vided: Gloucester is introduced simply as “a nobleman who had been Lear’s friend” (79), and Edmund “the general of Regan and Goneril’s army.” In this edition, which is aimed at young children, the narrator passes even more simplified judgments, opening with a preface in which Shakespeare is praised as “one of the greatest teachers ever known” (vi). This is not uncommon, of course; the Lambs, in their own preface, had written that they hoped Shakespeare’s plays would prove to their audience “a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions” (5). Lang’s preface appears to justify some of Shakespeare’s most difficult endings to explain to children, by stressing the lessons that can be learned even in “plays that are so sad,” and overlooking the fact that love and goodness do not always bring about a happy closure: We see how selfishness and cruel wickedness and envy can bring misery upon innocent people; how the longing to be great, the greed of power, can lead men and women into every sort of evil; how unselfish love and goodness always bring true happiness in the end. (vi) Fay Adams Britton’s “King Lear” (1907) is the adaptation that relies most unambiguously on fairy tale structure, the purpose of the whole collection being “to introduce in fairy tale fashion plots and characters from several Shakespearian plays, and by so doing familiarize the childish mind with the work of the great English poet” (Author’s note n. pag.). The author then adds that people tend to remember more clearly the stories that were told them when they were young than those that they could read by themselves, and concludes that “As the child later on comes to read for itself the desire for Shakespeare’s plays will have already established” (n. pag.). Not only does Britton’s retelling rehearse the characteristic division between the good and bad daughters, it also adds the wicked daughters’ bad treatment of Cordelia. Her reluctance to tell her father resembles the Cinderella/Stepsisters relationship in the fairy tale: . . . she was much disliked by her two older sisters, who were always trying to poison the mind of their father, King Lear, against his youngest daughter. . . . Cordelia often grieved over the ill-treatment she received from her two wicked sisters, and the manner in which they tried to deceive their father, but never complained to him of them, as she wanted his declining years to be happy. (31–32)
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While the “Cap o’ Rushes” variant differs from the “Cinderella” type in its lack of supernatural intervention (among other things), Britton’s tale introduces a fairy helper, Ariel, to assist Kent: I will place on your finger a ring, which holds a magic charm, and no harm shall befall you. I shall disguise you as a peasant, and you must return and approach your king for a place as one of his attendants. He will have sore need of you, now that he dwells with his designing daughters. (40) After Ariel has guided Lear and Kent to a safe cave in the woods, she warns Cordelia (in a scene that recalls Cinderella and her fairy-godmother) and suggests what she should do “to dethrone the usurpers” and place her father back on the throne. There is no subplot to interfere with the happy ending of Lear reinstated; the wicked daughters conveniently commit suicide, not out of jealousy but rather for “honourable reasons”: “when Goneril and Regan realized what their downfall meant, they poisoned themselves, so that they were no more trouble to their father” (47). The faithful Kent is restored back to health by the fairy, while Cordelia “carefully nursed her father back to health” (47–48). The ending is a fantasy of grandfatherly bliss, in which the female line of descent is erased, and a rejuvenated Lear “was destined to see many happy days, and to entertain the future King of Britain many times when he came with his fond father, the King of France, and his mother, the dearly beloved Cordelia” (30). Retaining the Subplot The next three Edwardian retellings I examine are longer texts, which retain a larger part of the subplot than did previous adaptations. The first is by Thomas Carter (1910), who was a scholar of Shakespeare and a doctor of theology. His “King Lear” is a hybrid text in the sense that it often alternates narration with substantial direct quotation from Shakespeare, but does not dispense with direct judgments—as in the description of Edgar and Edmund, contrasted very early in the story: “Edgar, the elder and legitimate, a young man of great nobility of character, loving, unsuspicious, and chivalrous5; and Edmund, the younger and illegitimate, bold, treacherous, and cruel” (29). Similarly, in Alice Spencer Hoffman’s adaptation (1910) Edgar is described as “true and noble, while Edmund, the younger, was crafty and envious” (289). Hoffman was an expert reteller and editor of stories of English
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history and Northern sagas, and her retelling is the first text in my selection that attempts to contrast the two plots: “Gloster did not see the difference in the characters of his two sons, even as Lear loved his three daughters without seeing the difference between the good and the bad” (289). Carter’s text is unusual in placing responsibility on Edmund immediately after his presentation: “Sunk into the pit of bitterness he became a subtle and cynical villain, ever on the outlook to work mischief. It is mainly through his evil that the story becomes a tragedy of blood and sorrow” (29). The subplot is well developed, with the presence of Edgar disguised as Poor Tom in the storm scene and in the hovel, a scene generally cut from adaptations for children. Carter even retains Edmund’s last words to Albany confessing the order he issued to have Cordelia hanged in prison, which may indicate a form of repentance in this character. Children’s ungratefulness (equally divided between Lear’s daughters and Gloucester’s illegitimate son) is the ultimate sin in this adaptation, which tends to excuse Lear (“a poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man, . . . once a king but now cast out by cruel ingratitude” [41–42]), and promises redemption at the end (“we feel that the great writer in the words “Look there, look there!” . . . lifts up the dark curtain for an instant that the light of the Eternal may shine through and speak of hope Beyond” [51]). Ingratitude is also mentioned at the end of Constance and Mary Maud’s “King Lear” (1913): “and so ends the sad story of King Lear and his daughters—all the foolishness and wickedness and base ingratitude” (240). Constance Maud wrote several novels, children’s books, and works of popular history. She lived in Chelsea with her sister Mary; both of them were active suffragettes. Their version of King Lear is quite remarkable for its use of the narrative counterpart of “reaction shots” (in cinematic language, a close-up in which the actor responds to an event or some other character’s words). For example, the narrator describes the way “the two sisters looked at each other and smiled” (213) after their father has shown his disappointment at Cordelia’s refusal to flatter him, while “the good Earl of Kent shook his head gravely” (213). The narrator occasionally focuses on looks and gestures, as when Cordelia turns to her sisters, “who regarded her with scornful looks” (216). A lot is made of sibling rivalry: the two sisters are not “ill pleased that Cordelia should mar her fortunes—it might mean more to them” (213); and when the king of France offers to marry her, “both these elder sisters were rather displeased that so powerful a king had chosen Cordelia
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in spite of her poverty” (216). As in Carter’s and Hoffman’s versions, the Mauds’ retelling contrasts Edgar, “a fine soldierly young man, of a great simplicity of character,” with Edmund, “always scheming and lying” (220). Edmund is also contrasted with the Duke of Albany, who is twice described as “gentle” (228, 233). With Edmund’s responsibility clearly established, the sisters’ deaths at the end appear less monstrous and well deserved than usual as the narrator refrains from negative judgments. In Goneril’s death in particular (offstage in Shakespeare’s play), a hint of heroic stoicism in her decision to kill herself can be detected: “She was no coward: she had played a losing game. Now all was lost, and, drawing a little jewelled dagger, she put an end to herself” (238). In the absence of poetic justice, and in a play in which it appears that everyone is punished regardless of his or her actions, the ending divides the characters between bad and good—placing on one side “all the foolishness and wickedness and base ingratitude” of the sisters, and on the other Cordelia and Kent, “like bright stars between the dark driving clouds of a stormy night” (240). Alice Spencer Hoffman’s version (1910), in which the subplot is introduced much later, places the blame on Lear, a tyrant in the domestic as well as the political sphere—a trait more explicitly explored in more recent adaptations: Being a King he was used to having his slightest wish obeyed on the instant; also, being a King, he was above the judgement of his people. He had, no doubt, made many mistakes before the last rash act which brought about the tragedy of our story. (281) As in earlier prose versions, the “Cinderella”-like opposition between the beautiful and elegant yet cold and haughty sisters and the modestly dressed but good Cordelia provides the background information for the reader to appreciate the latter’s later truthful words: Goneril and Regan were very beautiful, but when they had passed you remembered only their proud and haughty bearing, their rich robes and flashing jewels. And you forgot them altogether when Cordelia entered. . . . Her fair hair floated around her, and shone brighter than the golden circlet that rested upon it. From her wonderful eyes beamed such brightness of love and goodness that you forgot her jewels. (282) When Cordelia astonishes everybody with her answer, her sisters’ eyes “met for an instant, flashing triumph” (283). But sibling rivalry is, once
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again, stressed in both plots: the narrator repeatedly mentions that Cordelia is the favorite and that the sisters are aware of their father’s preference; and that “Edmund was jealous of his elder brother” (289). This is the only adaptation from this period that retains and retells Lear’s mock trial of his daughters in the hovel, when he believes he is seeing them, to the point that Kent is “unable to bear the terrible scene” (298) and begs Lear to lie down and rest. To balance that, there is a long description of the scene of Gloucester and Edgar/Tom on what the earl believes is a cliff. Once again, the king of France performs a Prince Charming role, as the romance element is foregrounded: How she loved him for his belief in her when all the world seemed against her! How she prized his love which asked nothing but her own love in return! Holding her in his protective arms he bade her say farewell to her father and sisters. (285) Alternating between plot and subplot has also the effect of producing an illusion of time passing and character development. When Cordelia meets Lear again, he is a changed man, after the elder daughters’ treatment and the terrible night of the storm. Uncharacteristically, the end has Albany, instead of the narrator, passing judgment on the daughters: “Goneril had killed herself, and . . . Regan was also dead from the poison given her by her sister. Albany cried that it was the judgement of the gods, for which none could feel pity” (307). And Edgar is described as ready to “bravely take up his duties” despite the fact that “the terrible sorrows which he had known would sadden his whole life” (309). As in the Mauds’ adaptation, Hoffman’s ends with Kent’s faithfulness and death, shortly to follow Cordelia and Lear on their last journey: He felt that life was ended for him, and we may be sure that when death called him the faithful Kent welcomed the summons, and went on that last journey as joyfully as the master that he loved had done before him. (309) These texts that retain the subplot tend to be more elaborate—the bad/good son/daughter polarity is less clear cut, characters appear more complex, and responsibility for the final disaster is more widely distributed. If, on the simplest possible level, some adaptors may have assumed that child readers are used to stories structured without subplots, these retellings prove the opposite—that retaining a subplot that
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provides a variation of the themes of the main plot (filial ingratitude, a father’s blindness to his offspring’s real feelings, etc.) results in a more nuanced and less simplified version of the play. Contemporary Adaptations Within the next group of adaptations, produced during the past fifty years and characterized by more colloquial language, two stand out for their explicit condemnation of Lear’s behavior: “King Lear of Britain” (1964), by the English novelist and poet Ian Serraillier, and the British biographer and writer Roger Lancelyn Green’s “King Lear” (1976). According to Serraillier, Lear “had given away all his royal powers . . . in an outburst of fantastic stupidity” (142; my emphasis). Serraillier’s version of Lear’s story is set in a primitive past, “Long ago, in a barbaric age before recorded history, when life was violent and men worshipped pagan gods . . .” (139). Even if it occasionally makes allowances for the king’s behavior (“in his old age he had grown vain and wilful; he was subjected to foolish whims, and his judgement was no longer what it used to be” [140]), Serraillier’s adaptation tends to insist on Lear’s vigor and energy: “He was taller than any man in the palace and in spite of his years, he did not stoop. He looked every inch a king” (140). Thus the decision of giving away his kingly duties appears to be the result of a sudden whim: shortly after Cordelia has failed to deliver the desired speech, the king flies into a rage, even if “in his heart Lear felt that Cordelia’s love was truer and deeper than her sisters’” (142). The sisters are initially contrasted on the basis of jewelry: Goneril wears a “dragon brooch, whose mouth was breathing fire,” and Regan “golden bracelets shaped like twining serpents,” while Cordelia wears an “enamelled brooch that her father had given her” (140). Each sister to her own jewel—an interesting way to suggest, by implication, the characters’ personality. The focus is on the wicked sisters and the “vain and obstinate” (142) king, whom Cordelia perhaps takes after, as in reply to his request “she remained stubbornly silent” (141). Lear’s cursing of Goneril is retained in all its violence, with no gloss from the narrator: In the wildness of his passion he called down a terrible curse on Goneril. He prayed that she might never bear a child, but if she should that it might be a torment to her and treat her with the same contempt and cruelty as she had treated her father. Then as a whirlwind he swept out of the palace. (147)
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Edmund is introduced, almost at the end of the story, simply as a “handsome, cheerful and ambitious rogue” (155) whose narrative function, as has been noted several times, is just to arouse intense jealousy between the sisters. Edgar is never named, and it is impossible to make the connection between the “wretched half naked beggar” (151) who shares the hovel with Gloucester and Lear in the stormy night and the brother who wounds and kills Edmund in the final duel. Interestingly, Serraillier’s narrator allows Lear a redemptive moment and wisdom in his madness, and prepares the meeting between him and Cordelia: “suffering had made [him] wiser and more perceptive. He had learnt how harmful flattery could be and the authority was seldom in the hands of those who knew how to use it best. . . . His sympathies had widened and he had begun to feel compassion for all mankind” (153). And death comes to Lear as a “blessing, for he could endure no more. . . . his living martyrdom ended at last” (157). Lancelyn Green’s version, like Serraillier’s, portrays a thoroughly despotic Lear who abuses his power: “he wanted to be flattered and treated almost as a God” (106), and even after his resignation “everyone was still to cringe to him and leap to obey his smallest wish, just as in the days when he had absolute power of life and death” (110). The subplot is introduced half-way through the story, to provide a mirrorsituation to that of Lear and his daughters: Lear was not the only father to be betrayed by his children. The King’s inability to control his passions, and the calculating cruelty and viciousness of his elder daughters, was mirrored in Gloster’s own family. Edmund was his illegitimate son: his true son, Edgar, had suffered even more severely than Cordelia. Edmund was completely wicked, but extremely cunning, while Edgar was the exact opposite: transparently honest and quite unsuspecting of any guile. (117) In this version Edmund’s deceptions of his father and brother, and his plotting, are narrated at length, as when he finds himself secretly engaged to both sisters: “Feeling sure that one would remove the other sooner or later, Edmund went his wicked way unconcerned” (123). Similarly, the daughters’ unkindness is represented as the result of plotting, and not as a reaction to his demands: “Sure enough, scarcely were they alone together, when Goneril and Regan fell to plotting, how they could rob the King of his last vestiges of power, and deprive him even of the hundred knights who were to attend on him” (110). The
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sisters’ deaths are narrated in a more neutral way, not as a deserved punishment for their deeds. As Edmund’s character is fleshed out, evil seems to be more evenly distributed between the newly made earl of Gloucester and Lear’s daughters. The foremost contemporary interpreter of Shakespeare for children is Leon Garfield, whose individualistic style is combined with his interest in performance. Garfield’s forte in his novels is to produce a pastiche of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century styles; he has a talent for dramatic and melodramatic scene painting, which stands him in very good stead for interpreting Shakespeare. What characterizes Garfield’s adaptations is precisely what Stanley Wells has called “a crisp, metaphorical style” (148). One of the problems that adaptors need to address is that of language: should Shakespeare be “translated” into the easier modern idiom, or should one attempt to maintain a recognizably Shakespearean language? Garfield has discussed his choices in an article called “The Penny Whistle: The Problem of Writing Stories from Shakespeare” (1990). He believes in using direct speech wherever possible, surrounding it with prose that should approximate to it: “I have found it perfectly possible to write within Shakespeare’s vocabulary without being in the least archaic” (96). This approach echoes similar concerns on the part of the Lambs, who had written in their preface that “words introduced into our own language since his time have been as far as possible avoided” (3). A modern critic, Gillian Beer, has described the Lambs’ language as “a ranging Shakespearean language bound in by common sense prose” (138). Garfield’s 1985 version of Lear is unique in the scarcity of explicit narrative judgments in the first half of the story. While in the theater the audience forms its opinion on what the characters say about themselves or other characters, and on their actions and behaviors, in Garfield’s text free indirect speech allows readers to be less reliant on the narrator’s “superior” judgments as they enter the characters’ consciousness, thoughts, and (limited) perspectives on events. Therefore, the first scene is filtered through Lear’s consciousness: “What father owned a child as dear as Goneril! . . . What father owned a child as precious as Regan!” (29–30). But for the reaction to Cordelia’s words, the reader can’t access the king’s thoughts—only reaction shots in description of gestures, looks, faces: “Stretched smiles withered; the elder sisters slid their looks sideways; the youngest stared straight ahead. . . . He saw uneasy courtiers, with frightened faces, cowering back like cattle before a threatened storm” (31). Later on, the reader follows Lear’s changed
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perception of his daughter Regan: “And was this Regan, his warm, fond Regan, standing before him, this stony Duchess with her granite Duke?” (35). The daughters’ wickedness is emphasized by Gloucester, who in Garfield’s retelling approaches the king in order to warn him that “Lear’s daughters were planning their father’s death” (39). In contrast, in Shakespeare’s play Gloucester tells Kent that “[Lear’s] daughters seek his death” (3.4.159); this does not necessarily suggest that they had been actively plotting to kill him, as in the anonymous Leir, but that they have turned the old king out of doors and death could be the consequence. As in Lancelyn Green’s version, a relationship is established relatively early in the narration between Lear’s plight and that of Gloucester, “another aged father in that motherless kingdom of Lear” (32), and between their rejected children Cordelia and Edmund, “as noble and foolishly honest in his way as Cordelia had been in hers” (32). The narrator’s voice emerges more clearly in the second half of the story, when, again, the bad offspring of the two elderly men are perceived to share the same ambition and greed: “already Lear’s evil daughters and Gloucester’s evil son were being poisoned by the very instruments that had brought them power: greed, lust, cruelty, envy and ambition” (43). If one of the harshest judgments is found in Albany’s free indirect speech (“Even he, mild Albany, had reached his limits of enduring creatures so devilish: the evil young Earl, the vile Regan . . . the monster who was his wife” [48]), the final comment after the sisters’ deaths is more clearly the narrator’s: “the monsters had destroyed each other” (49). While in the first part of the story readers are encouraged to try and solve the psychological puzzle of this play, finding pieces in the characters’ own perceptions and in descriptions of gestures and movements, in the second part they are more conventionally guided by the narrator’s external voice and perspective. Interestingly, Garfield’s adaptation is the only text in my selection that devotes a section to the realities of war between England and France. This conflict becomes an emblem of all wars, reminding young readers, with the reference to poppies in particular, of armed conflicts closer to their own experiences: Gaunt-eyed men fought gaunt-eyed men, struggling to and fro over the harmless land. It was a world more to die in than to live in, as crops were destroyed, cottages shattered, and men and horses screamed where birds had sung. Soon the field was a graveyard: some had died bravely, some in flight, but it made no difference as they lay, making poppies with their blood. (47)
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As always, Garfield does not refrain from addressing complex and controversial issues. He emphasizes that the domestic conflict in the play is not something that can be contained in the family unit, but resonates at a political and cosmological level. This, of course, is one of Shakespeare’s favorite themes in the tragedies. In the past few years there has been a proliferation of retellings, but unfortunately variety and quantity have not always resulted in superior work. Andrew Matthews’s 2009 King Lear, for example, tends to sanitize and simplify complex issues; in this version, Lear’s terrible curse on Goneril is watered down to “if Goneril has a child, let it be ungrateful and disobedient, so she can feel what I am feeling” (26). A very interesting text which relies on the interaction between prose narrative and the character’s actual words in the play, and between the play and the audience, is Marcia Williams’s version in the collection Bravo, Mr. William Shakespeare! (2000). Williams, who declared that she was inspired to write her own rendition of the plays by a visit to the Globe when it was still under construction, adopts the comic book form: the characters in the strips use Shakespeare’s dialogue, while a summary of the plot is provided underneath. What is quite unique here is the recreation of an original period performance at the Globe, as the margins of the page become the space of the theater where groundlings or higher-class patrons, including Queen Elizabeth I, keep up a running commentary on what they are watching. The volatile world of the performance actively “frames” both scenes and prose texts in an effectively metatheatrical way which recalls Shakespeare’s own framing devices. Members of the audience of King Lear, for example, have their say in a number of matters. A Queen lookalike comments on Lear’s decision to divide the kingdom: “Being a virgin queen does avoid these problems,” while a groundling remarks on the sisters’ behavior: “Cantankerous harpies! They’ve got it all now,” and another remarks: “Men like a bit of a fuss” (24). The parallels between plot and subplot are noticed by the spectators: “Brother killing brother and sister killing sister. . . ,” says a groundling (28), while a lady interposes: “First your dad. Now your husband,” which appears as a comment on the cartoon showing Goneril writing to Edmund: “But Goneril loved him too. Jealous of Regan, she wrote to Edmund suggesting he kill her husband, Albany, leaving her free to marry him” (27; original emphasis). The voices in the frame, which produce a distancing and metatheatrical effect, also challenge the monologic voice of the narrator, thus establishing a multiplicity of viewpoints and interpretations. The voices
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intersecting after the ending (“Lear had lost everything. What he had not given away had been taken from him. . . . So Edgar became king and tried to rule with honour, in memory of two wronged old men: his father, the Earl of Gloucester, and his liege, King Lear” [29]) cynically stress the bleakness of the closure. “Wise words, but a bit late,” says a gentleman on the balcony when Edgar pronounces the lines “The weight of this sad time we must obey. . . .” A groundling lady replies: “Wise words always come too bloomin’ late” (29). Other spectators complain of the dreariness of the ending, like the groundling who leaves the page saying, “A pox on all this sadness. Let’s see if the Rose has a merrier play” (29). Even if the author modestly declared that her intention was to provide “nothing more than a stepping stone to the Bard himself” (“Bravo” 37), this is certainly one of the most humorous and innovative adaptations, which tries to recapture the atmosphere of a live production and is not afraid to mess about with the Bard in a light-hearted way; in fact, humor is often used to tame the disturbing potential of the play. With the exception of Fay Britton’s retelling, all of the versions I have examined here are generally quite close to Shakespeare’s text, and their tribute to the fairy tale tradition is often limited to characterization—especially a clear-cut division between good and bad characters which often does not render a good service to the complexities of character. But there are exceptions; two contemporary authors have been able to connect King Lear and folktale tradition in a more adventurous way. Shakespeare’s Storybook. Fairy Tales that Inspired the Bard (2001), by Patrick Ryan, a teacher and professional storyteller, is a collection of the traditional folktales that provided sources for Shakespeare’s plays. It includes a version of “Cap o’ Rushes” that starts with a king and three princesses (unlike Jacobs’s version of the folktale, in which it is a gentleman who sets the love test), and is preceded by an introduction highlighting the connection between the folktale and King Lear. But it is in William Hooks’s Moss Gown (1987) that the folktale subtext, which is less noticeable in these contemporary adaptations, returns with a vengeance. This version is a conflation of “Cap o’ Rushes,” “Cinderella,” and King Lear, introducing the motif of the division of the kingdom (in this version, a great plantation “in the old South” of the United States). There is no subplot, and the father is more loving than Lear (“I must keep my word. Candace will always have my love, but all my lands I give to Retha and Grenadine” [12]). In this version it is the sisters who turn Candace/Cordelia “out into the stormy night.”
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The “Cinderella” plot provides a magic helper, “a slender green-eyed witch woman, black and sleek as a velvet cat” (13), who gives Candace her moss gown. The tale now follows the “Cap o’ Rushes” story with little variation: Candace, after her period of work in the kitchen of a grand house, marries the young master and at last is reunited with her father, impoverished and “almost blind” (41), who has been turned out by the “two cruel daughters who had squandered his wealth” (42). Before revealing herself, however, she invites him to an unsalted meal, where he recognizes her and begs her forgiveness. In Britton’s and Hooks’s substantial revisions, King Lear is not only transposed into narrative, it enters an altogether different fictional world in which one-dimensionality of character and dissolution of conflict are the norm. Fairy tale conventions, such as the introduction of magic help, and the erasure of subplots help to provide a happy ending, dissolving the consequences and responsibility for the father’s foolish behavior. Of course, some simplification in the description of characters inevitably occurs in all the adaptations that have been discussed here, with the possible exception of the first part of Garfield’s text. The basic division between good and bad characters (with Lear often in between) is in some way inevitable in this kind of narrative, in which explicit critique of tyrannical parenthood is more and more evident as we approach contemporary texts. As Lanier wonders in Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, a question of cultural politics hovers over all Shakespeare adaptations: “Whose interests do these adaptations finally serve? . . . Do they make Shakespeare more relevant and democratic, or do they rob him of his distance from contemporary mass culture and thus his capacity for critique or alternative values?” (108; original emphasis). Although all of these adaptations pay homage to the Bard’s greatness and celebrate the fact that Shakespeare should be part of a child’s reading, they do not reproduce the text uncritically: even such apparently small and insignificant choices as varying narrative proportions between main plot and subplot, for example, have ideological consequences. In prose rewritings of King Lear, a definite force that pulls toward simplification and polarization in characterization is discernible—this is one of the possible ways of dealing with the disturbing implications of the fraught family relations in this play. By eliminating or drastically reducing the subplot, blame can be placed more easily on the “wicked daughters,” while Lear’s responsibility as king and parent is diminished. This tendency seems to have prevailed in the Lambs’ “King Lear” and in the versions immediately following. Early twentieth-century attempts
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to retain the subplot resulted in more careful characterization and the possibility of exploring parallels in similar (with reversed gender) family situations. The best recent adaptations have foregrounded the parents’ responsibility and the dangers of despotic behavior in both the family and the state, and adaptations like Williams’s have staged a polyphony of voices as alternatives to the authority of the narrator. On the other hand, some adaptors have used the folktale source of the Lear story to pursue a different path; retellings that more closely follow “Cap o’ Rushes” have created an alternative intermediate text going back to the story that inspired Shakespeare, but dispense with the political significance of the play and the interaction between plot and subplot. A revised happy ending grants pacification to a play that deliberately, and perhaps nihilistically, withdraws it, with a definitive separation between (good and bad) children and their parents. As they vary in distributing different degrees of responsibility among the characters, expand character roles in the economy of the play, and raise issues of gender as well as family (and state) politics, all these adaptations are revealing of the way adaptors of different eras conceive of conflict between generations—all the while providing what they believe is a mediated, safe, and often abridged version of the play which would ultimately have educational value for a young readership. Notes I would like to thank Peter Hunt for his help in revising this essay for publication. Of Cordelia, Bradley writes that “Of all Shakespeare’s heroines she knew least of joy. She grew up with Goneril and Regan as sisters. Even her love for her father must have been mingled with pain and anxiety” (292). 2 Hamlet, as has been noted, is built on embedded narratives, like the narrative of the ghost, “in many ways the most powerful of all the play’s story-tellers” (Neill 223), which triggers the action of the play; the story of “The Murder of Gonzago”; Ophelia’s story of Hamlet’s love for her; Hamlet’s own accounts of how he escaped from the pirates and later of his childhood friend Yorick, etc. See also Kinney; and Tosi. 3 “The suffering Cordelia, who sacrifices her personal security and happiness with France to devote, after all, all her ‘care and duty’ to her unkind father, and redeem him by her ‘kind nursery’, was well suited to the psychological fantasy needs of dutiful Victorian daughters” (Bottoms 112; original emphasis). 4 For a discussion of Romantic attitudes toward the staging of Shakespeare’s plays, see Han; and Park. 5 Richmond (209) briefly discusses Carter’s use of “chivalrous” as an example of the Victorian translation of chivalry into contemporary notions of the gentleman. 1
Works Cited Aarne, Antti. The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography, Translated and Enlarged by S. Thompson. 2nd rev. ed. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1981.
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