‘Enter Kent, Gloster, and Bastard’: Beginning King Lear and the Choice of the Audience

Abstract

The title page of the first quarto of Shakespeare’s 1608 King Lear foregrounds many things: Shakespeare’s name in the largest font used, an emphasis that this King Lear is “HIS”, the fascination with Edgar as “Tom of Bedlam” and the fact that this is the play “As it was played before the Kings Maiestie at Whitehall upon S. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes”. The particularity of that moment and its complex implications has been explored before, of course, but there are new ways to rethink that moment when the play met a particular gathering of spectators in a particular room on that day in the Christmas holidays. And, from that interaction, this article moves on to consider other performances that define such purposive positionings of the play. It is one thing to, say, perform King Lear in the repertory of the RSC and something very different to perform it, for example, to an audience of carers for the elderly as part of Theatre of War’s King Lear Project. As Kent and Gloucester begin the play, so King Lear negotiates with its audiences, usually made up of play-goers who have chosen the play and sometimes those who have been chosen by the play.

Where to begin? Or should I make that question into ‘Which beginning do I begin with?’? There will be, as this piece unfolds, numerous moments of beginning: beginnings known or hypothesized; beginnings clearly or barely remembered; beginnings familiar or, most frequently, lost.

The most familiar beginning of all is this, though; in its unmodernized forms of spelling and layout, it becomes embedded in a different history, one that foregrounds its early modern identity, something we never quite eradicate nor fully assent to:

Enter Kent, Gloster, and Bastard.

Kent.

I Thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany then Cornwell.

(Shakespeare 1608, sig. B1r)

But, that beginning in itself suggests another one: ‘As it was played before the Kings Maiestie at Whitehall upon S. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes’ (sig. [A]1r). And, it entangles in my mind, though probably in no-one else’s, with a beginning of a production of the play in which two men come on to the stage, each accompanied by someone the audience might assume to be a servant; each sits on a bench while their servants deal with their boots. After a long silence one begins that now-familiar first line. And, in turn, and finally for now, the memory of that event makes me recall the opening of a film’s sound-track, also starting with a long silence, finally ended with the sound of a door closing (if we are watching carefully, we will see the door swinging shut at the edge of the frame), and then a man, whose face we see on screen, says ‘Know’—or is it ‘No’?—before the next words, after a pause, ‘that we have divided/In three our kingdom’ (1.1.36–7)1, resolve the auditory ambiguity.

The last two of these beginnings are very much my own. The opening scene is from the first production of King Lear that I saw, the RSC at the Aldwych Theatre in London in 1963, the London transfer of Peter Brook’s production starring Paul Scofield. I was 11, perhaps unusually young for King Lear, but my parents did not think that watching Shakespeare in performance needed age controls. Since my concern in this article is, in part, with the nature of the audience that a production seeks, the particularities of its moment in the creation of that company–play-goer contract, I wonder why my parents booked tickets. They saw many RSC productions, more in London than in Stratford-upon-Avon, but I have no notion of whether they had seen Lear before or knew anything about it beyond its name; there was no copy of Shakespeare on their bookshelves. Quite why the opening should have stayed in my memory is unclear, unless it was the warning in the programme that the interval would come after two hours of playing time. Perhaps that is why I remember, perhaps inaccurately, the last moments before the interval: the blinded Gloucester being ignored by the servants who crossed the stage, for Brook had cut those who, at least in Q1, set off to help him (3.7.98–106).

The opening sounds are from Brook’s rethinking of that production as film (1970), a slow transformation that included an unfinished attempt by Ted Hughes to rewrite/translate the play, but with a result that is still an object lesson in how one might turn theatre into film, about as far away as it is possible to get from our current fascination with filming live theatre. The total silence of the opening credits, as the camera pans to and fro across a group of people waiting for news, is finally broken by the closing of that door that excludes them and the cut to Lear’s face, slumped inside the phallic throne, as he opens the dialogue witha tension between negativity and knowledge. I place this here as a beginning for considering the different demographic of film-goers, though the audience for indie film-making and a Shakespeare film as unyielding as Brook’s may be very narrow indeed.

We know little of the make-up of the RSC theatre’s audience. They can analyze their box-office data in terms of repeated bookings and location but not in terms of age range, education, other theatre-going and similar features. And, we know even less about early modern theatre-going, in spite of Andrew Gurr’s excellent assemblage of the little we know in his study (Gurr 2004). But, there are particular cases where the demographic is fully apparent. My first beginning was the opening of the text in the first printing, Q1, but that text refers on its title page to the first known performance, defining the printed text as being that which was played before King James on 26 December, the saint’s day for St Stephen, as the first event in the Christmas sequence of plays in 1607, or so it might appear to be from that formulation, given that the date of the title page was 1608. But, since the same wording was present in the Stationers’ Register entry on behalf of John Busby and Nathaniel Butter in November 1607, it must refer to the Christmas of 1606. The error could conceivably be deliberate, encouraging a book-buyer to want this play that was so recently performed before the King, or it could simply be the accident of transmission, a phrase that no-one in the printing house noticed to be no longer true. There is a convenient comparison in the 1598 printing of that ‘pleasant conceited comedie called Loves labors lost’ which announces the text as being ‘As it was presented before her Highnes this last Christmas’, though on that title page, the identification of that being the text that the Queen saw/heard is in tension with the comment below that this is actually the play ‘Newly corrected and augmented By W. Shakespere’ (Shakespeare 1598, sig. [A]1r).

How accurately Q1’s text represents the playing text at that performance before King James is indecipherable, but, given the current scholarly consensus that Q1 is most likely derived from ‘foul papers’, perhaps via a scribal transcript from a draft in Shakespeare’s hand, it may well have differed from the text played before King James. Now, the title King Lear is seen unequivocally as Shakespeare’s, whether on stage or film, and I think here of the very different way that adaptations of the play on film, such as Don Boyd’s My Kingdom (2001) or Sangeeta Datta’s Life Goes On (2009), do not feel the need to foreground their Lear-ness. Q1 goes out of its way to assert that this is Shakespeare’s play. The layout of the titlepage starts with by far the largest font used for ‘M. William Shak-speare’ and then, only slightly smaller, ‘HIS’ before it echoes the title for the first edition of King Leir (Anonymous 1605): where the earlier play begins ‘THE True Chronicle History of King Leir, and his three daughters’, Q1 offers ‘True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King Lear and his three Daughters.’

It is reasonable to assume that the first performances of Lear were at the King’s Men’s own theatre or, as the Q1 title page puts it, ‘his Maiesties seruants playing vsually at the Gloabe on the Bancke-side’. Playbills for early modern theatre performances seem not to have included the playwright’s name and that probably meant that those who saw Lear at the Globe may not have been aware that it was by Shakespeare. Specific court entertainments aside, I cannot identify a play performed by a professional company that was premiered at court until the 1630s. Quite when King Lear might have been performed at the Globe is difficult to determine. There were prolonged closures of the theatres in 1606 because of plague outbreaks. It is reasonable to assume that King Lear was not one of those the King’s Men performed at Greenwich and Hampton Court when King Christian IV of Denmark was in England to visit his sister, King James’s wife, in early August 1606. If it had been, it would not have been likely to have been performed again at court a few months later. So, the window for performances prior to 26 December 1606 narrows to April to June 1606 (Barroll 1991, p. 155).

One last concern before I bring the strands of this opening together: where in Whitehall Palace did that performance of King Lear take place? There were two spaces used for performances: the Hall and the Great Chamber. In theory, either could have been used on 26 December 1606, but the Hall, the much larger of the two spaces, was going to be used on 6 January 1607 for the celebrations for Lord Hay’s marriage, including an elaborate Masque written by Thomas Campion. The Office of Works’ accounts detailed exactly how complex the preparations for that event were: ‘settinge vpp degrees in the haulle and boarding the same against the Lorde Hayes marryage…paveinge a great p[ar]te of the hall w^ch was taken vpp to place the degrees stages and devises’ (Wilson and Hill 1975, p. 21). There would be four more plays performed at court between King Lear and the wedding: two by the King’s Men, one by the Children of Blackfriars, and one by the Prince’s Men. In all, there would be no fewer than sixteen plays in the season which ran to 27 February, nine by the King’s Men and six by the Prince’s Men. It was usual for the Great Chamber to be prepared for plays in December for the Christmas season of plays with payments made to Sir Ricard Coningsby for ‘m/r [= ‘making ready’] the greate Chamber for the plaies’ (Cook and Wilson 1962, p. 10).

In spite of its name, the Great Chamber was not all that large. It measured 26 feet by 57 feet, dimensions we know because of the survival of its foundations, and had been built by Thomas Wolsey in 1515 when the palace was known as York Place (Thurley 1999, p. 18). As James Shapiro suggests, it was ‘an attractive playing space’ but ‘[o]nce a scaffold was installed for the actors, the Great Chamber could accommodate only three hundred or so spectators, so only the most privileged at court would have been able to see King Lear’ (Shapiro 2015, p. 299). My investigation of the space, with very helpful assistance from Professor David Mayernik of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture, suggests that Shapiro’s number is too high. The play-goers at court were all seated, and there needed to be a raised dais for the King and Queen. It was not only the sizeable dais that reduced the seating capacity but also the fact that no-one could be seated between the dais and the stage, for it would be impossible for them to have their backs towards the King. John Webb, Inigo Jones’ assistant for a number of court entertainments, drew the floor plan for a performance of Florimène in 1635 in the Hall, not the Great Chamber, and the space between the dais and the stage is a large, yawning void (Astington 1999, plate 3). Allowing for something analogous in the Great Chamber, Professor Mayernik found room for only 120 spectators, making the list of those who could attend an even more privileged group, and that number possible only by leaving a stage barely 12 feet deep.

Let me return to the printed text’s opening exchange:

Kent. I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.

Gloucester. It did always seem so to us. But now, in the division of the kingdoms, it appears not which of the dukes he values most, for equalities are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety.

(1.1.1–7)

Of course, it is easy to see what it achieves and why Shakespeare starts there, setting up the division action, here apparently a division between two (as the word ‘moiety’ also suggests, for, though it could mean ‘a share’, its root sense is ‘a half’), not, as at least it soon seems to be heading towards, a division between three; it begins as a division between two men, not three daughters. The rapidity with which it then leaves this and is then focused on Gloucester and his bastard son (and Q1 consistently identifies him in stage directions and speech headings as ‘Bastard’ here) leaves the opening anticipation hanging until Lear’s entry.

So, how does it sound to different audiences? Brook’s screenplay simply eliminates it all so that it can start with ‘Know’. In the theatre, play-goers who know the play know who Albany and Cornwall are; others may, these days, have spotted the roles in the cast list; still others may just wait to find out who these two dukes are and why they should be benefiting from the King’s division. Early modern audiences who knew King Leir, the earlier source-play, either from having seen it or from the 1605 printed text, would have expected the husbands of Gonorill and Ragan to be the King of Cornwall and Morgan, King of Cambria, respectively. The significance of Shakespeare’s choice of names is really defined by the map that Lear divides or has already had marked up with its divisions. If the map is already on stage, some Kents, such as Nicholas Hannen at the Old Vic in 1946, have consulted it, looking at the division as a motivation for his first line (Shakespeare 1987, p. 59).

The map is probably not at any point visible to the audience and, in any case, as Gavin Hollis has argued (Hollis 2007), few play-goers at the Globe would have had the cartographic literacy to understand it. Even so, the force of the naming of the dukedoms would be likely to have meant something to them, with Cornwall as the county marking the south-west tip of England and Albany as the land north of the Humber, often used as a synonym for Scotland.

For some of the Globe’s play-goers and undoubtedly for all those in the Great Chamber at Whitehall, there was an additional and powerful echo in the titles Kent names. The Duke of Cornwall was a title held by Henry Frederick Stuart, Prince Henry, the elder son of King James, granted to him on his father’s accession to the English crown in 1603 as the traditional dukedom of the eldest son of the monarch. His younger brother, Prince Charles, had been given the dukedom of Albany, the traditional title for the second son of the King of Scotland, at his baptism in 1600 and would hold it until his accession to the throne in 1625, when he became King Charles I. So, at court at least, in the presence of the monarch, Kent’s opening line sounds as much like a comment on King James as on King Lear, a moment of court gossip that enticingly reflects back on two members of the audience, King James and his Queen, Anne of Denmark; it is unclear whether the two Princes were present. In the play, neither duke is Lear’s son, of course, but, because at this point Kent does not define the relationship and Lear, later, will speak of them as ‘Our son of Cornwall,/And you, our no less loving son of Albany’ (1.1.40–1), the ambiguity of the term is still present. ‘Son’ used in the sense of ‘son-in-law’ is, according to the OED (son, n., 3.b), now archaic and rare, but Shakespeare uses it elsewhere, as, for instance, when Baptista Minola says to Lucentio, his son-in-law, ‘Son, I’ll be your half’ (The Taming of the Shrew, 5.2.84, quoted OED).

I am not for a moment suggesting that, by virtue of that first line, Prince Henry is to be seen as in any way like the play’s brutal Duke of Cornwall nor that King James is therefore to be seen as somehow like Lear, an idea that would have been a strange one for the King’s Men to be making in the King’s presence. That King Lear is a play about dividing the kingdom or, in Q1, ‘kingdoms’ (itself an allusion to the two distinct kingdoms King James separately ruled and sought to unite, as well as the two Kings who are Leir’s sons-in-law in King Leir) is an evocation of the project of the Union that King James sought and never achieved, for the personal union in the body of King James was not a political union until 1707. It cannot be an accident that Shakespeare turns away from writing about English Kings (until Henry VIII) and to writing about two Kings of Britain (Lear and Cymbeline) and a King of Scotland (Macbeth) after James’ accession, for he styled himself as King of Great Britain and Ireland. For the moment, I simply want to mark the way in which the opening exchange is heard differently by different play-goers. The gossipy quality heard in the Great Chamber is far less likely to have been heard as such at the Globe and, as we move from the then to the now, it is reasonable to think that no-one, except the occasional Shakespeare scholar, will hear it that way today. As we strive to research audience responses, we need to be more fully alert, then, to particularities that either are or have become largely invisible. From the response of an 11-year-old who had to wait for the play to unfold itself to the court’s response to a line they could not but hear as an allusion to the King’s two sons, the wide gap between individuals’ connection to the play is striking.

Anglophone productions of King Lear have tended to occupy a narrow range of possibilities with, until recently, rare exceptions. One such is the remarkable re-thinking of King Lear as The Shadow King (2013), written by Michael Kantor and Tom E. Lewis, which relocated the play to an Australian indigenous community whose connection to land is totally different from the notion of ownership that is fundamental to white colonialism and, indeed, to the play itself. When we come to international non-anglophone and transnational productions, the complexities only increase. Let me take as a case study Uruwang: Saengmyeonggwa Sansaengui Fantasy (King Uru: A Fantasia of Life and Coexistence), Kim Myung-Gon’s 2000 (Kim 2000) production for the National Theatre of Korea. This exhilarating, brilliant adaptation raises a number of provocative issues in transformative adaptation, especially in terms of audience response. This is not the least important feature of Uruwang and I turn to it because this narrative completely rebalances Cordelia’s presence, turning her into a lead, perhaps even the lead beside its Lear, King Uru himself, with far, far beyond the 3% of the lines she gets in Shakespeare’s play. But, even as I begin to mark outthe cultural specificities of King Uru, its performance forms, and its narratives, all of which reflect its embeddedness in Korean cultures of performance and meaning, I also want to note the nature of its performance spaces. Premiered in Seoul, King Uru went on to play on an unusual circuit of international festivals, including Bogotá, Jerusalem, Osaka, The Hague, Aspendos, and Carthage. Kim’s exuberantly brilliant production was designed for a broad audience and it certainly provided spectacle to suit. But, it also explored aspects of Korean folk-legend, recognizable to a Korean audience as soon as the Cordelia figure was identified as Princess Bari. It is exactly the kind of production that Younglim Han has identified as ‘a movement towards Korean religion and philosophy-based approaches that provide new ways of involving Korean Shakespeare with the interface between the intellectual and the corporeal, the spiritual and the material world, mental and embodied knowledge.’ (Han 2012, p. 161). Han also explores another Korean version of King Lear that makes use of the Princess Bari myth, Lear: Washing the Hands with River Water, directed by Park Jang-Ryul for his theatre company Theatre Group Ban in 2008, a kind of Lear sequel that begins three years after Lear’s death (see also Han 2008).

Princess Bari is a vital figure in Korean mythology. Abandoned by her parents at birth because she is female, she later learns that her father is seriously ill. He can only be cured by her crossing the boundary to the world of the dead and bringing back water that has medicinal properties able to cure him. Her skills also include the ability to resurrect the dead. Bari herself attains divine status and has been worshipped as the first Korean shaman. She is usually identified as the patroness of shamans, especially female ones, and conductor of dead souls. Indeed, it is from her that shamans ‘inherit the ultimate power to lead the spirits of the dead to eternity’ (Han 2012, p. 163). So, it is no surprise, except to audiences who do not know the myth, that the performance includes shamanistic rituals, the journey of the Princess, and her own apparent death; and, it is a surprise to audiences who do know the narrative that her skills, her determination, and her heroic travels to the heavens, while sufficient to cure King Uru of his madness, are not able to resurrect him when he dies of heart failure, thinking Bari dead, stabbed by the assassin sent by Solji, the play’s Edmund character. Bari is only wounded and revives, cradling her dying father in her arms in double inversion, both of Lear (living father, dead daughter) and of the pietà (living mother, dead son) to which Lear alludes. In the complex final number, Bari is accompanied by the spirits of her father and of her mother, Lady Gildae, as she is dressed as a shaman and performs rites for the dead, her first shamanistic act as a Mudang, leading them towards the world of the dead, surrounded by a chorus of female shamans ecstatically dancing ‘the dance of life and love’ as it is defined, with Bari alone in a spotlight on the darkening stage, leaving her status as living or dead ambiguous, at least to me, though the ambiguity may be inherent in the role of the shaman as a mediator between the two worlds of the dead and the living.

In terms of performance styles, King Uru works firmly within multiple traditional conventions of Korean performance, ranging from pansori, a form of story-telling with a singer and drum, to changgeuk, an elaborate opera tradition, taking along the way the puppetry forms of Kkokdu Noleum, the mask dance Talchum, the travelling performing troupes of Namsadangpae, the gwang-dae minstrels and, most strikingly of all, the shamanistic rituals of Gut performed by a Mudang (shaman), extensively used for the Princess Bari materials.2

You may have noted, as I sped past it, that one of the figures in the final sequence is the late Lady Gildae, King Uru’s second wife, and she is present as a spirit at the play’s opening, watching, commenting on, and connecting with her daughter, warning her that ‘This land, this kingdom, will be drenched with blood’. As Howard Barker put it in the preface to his Seven Lears, first performed in 1989,

• Shakespeare’s King Lear is a family tragedy with a significant absence.
• The Mother is denied existence in King Lear.
• She is barely quoted even in the depths of rage or pity.
• She was therefore expunged from memory.
• This extinction can only be interpreted as repression. (Barker 1990, [vii])

King Uru refuses to accept that erasure, re-presents the missing mother/wife, and establishes her from the first as a spirit presence, belonging to the narrative of this transformed Cordelia. But, this also points to another beginning, for King Leir began in the aftermath of the Queen’s funeral:

Thus to our grief the obsequies performed

• Of our (too late) deceased and dearest Queen,
• Whose soul I hope, possessed of heavenly joys,
• Doth ride in triumph ’mongst the Cherubins;
• Let us request your grave advice, my Lords,
• For the disposing of our princely daughters,
• For whom our care is specially employed,
• As nature bindeth to advance their states,
• In royal marriage with some princely mates:
• For wanting now their mother’s good advice,
• Under whose government they have received
• A perfect pattern of a virtuous life:
• Left as it were a ship without a stern,
• Or silly sheep without a Pastor’s care;
• Although ourselves do dearly tender them,
• Yet are we ignorant of their affairs:
• For fathers best do know to govern sons;
• But daughters’ steps the mother’s counsel turns. (King Leir (Anonymous 1605))

Shakespeare’s choice not to mention Lear’s wife at the start is echoed by the brevity and tone of the two mentions of her later: Lear’s brutal response to Regan’s ‘I am glad to see your highness’, ‘…if thou shouldst not be glad/I would divorce me from thy mother’s tomb/Sepulchring an adulteress’ (2.2.318–21) and Kent’s comment that ‘The stars above us govern our conditions,/Else one self mate and make could not beget/Such different issues’ (4.3.34–6). Where Leir faces the difficulty of dealing with three unmarried daughters, Lear has only one to marry off. The refusal to begin the narrative at this point is the beginning of that effective invisibility, something Uruwang rectifies or at least rebalances.

It should, by now, be apparent that King Uru is in many respects a mash-up: Korean mythology and performance traditions on one side and Shakespeare’s play on the other. As Alexa Alice Joubin shows, the position of the spectator transforms or rebalances this binary through a process of echoing and/or ghosting (Joubin 2021, pp. 108–12). For a Korean audience, it is dominantly a Bari narrative; for anglophone audiences, it is equally dominantly King Lear. Viewed from either side, the conjunction of the two sources is exciting but it may not necessarily be clearly functional. Instead, Joubin suggests, following a review by Kim So-yeon, ‘the splicing together of these two narratives into a condensed, simplified form fails to sustain either narrative’ (Joubin 2021, p. 108).

I am less convinced than Joubin that the two narratives do not cohere. But, it is clear that the contact between the two demonstrates the limitations and narrownesses of Shakespeare’s approach to his female characters. For all Cordelia’s manifest claims of agency—from the response of ‘nothing’ to being the armed general of an invading army—she ends objectified as a pitiable corpse, one of those female bodies about which Carol Rutter has written so well in Enter the Body (Rutter 2001). As Hyon-U Lee argues, one of the characteristics of Korean Shakespeare productions in the 1990s was a marked tendency to create or recreate major female characters as ‘new women active and powerful enough to hold sway over the meanings or structures of the productions’ (Lee 2009, p. 51; see also Lee 2008). He is particularly interested in the strikingly strong Lady Macbeth and Juliet in, for instance, Han Tae-Sook’s Lady Macbeth in 1998 and Oh Tae-Suk’s 2001 Romeo. By comparison, King Uru offers him something less satisfactory. While it moves Cordelia’s significance (and an Ophelia’s that he also explores) ‘from the periphery to the core’, ‘their extended roles are connected to the spiritual sphere rather than our own earthly world. They undergo mystification…Certainly they are not only more positive, more powerful, more sexual, but also more loyal, more sacrificial, and even spiritual; in other words, they seem to be mystified in the manner we have traditionally wished from femininity—as the mother god.’ (Lee 2009, p. 52).

While on tour, Uruwang was filmed in Aspendos, in Turkey, in the extraordinary and best-preserved of all Roman theatres, built in 155 CE. That recording is available on the magnificent Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive website, accompanied by much helpful contextualizing. It also produces, for most online viewers, the unhelpful experience of regular shots of large screens either side of the stage (side titles?) with translations of the Korean dialogue and lyrics into Turkish. But, watching the film, I become newly aware of the ways in which the international touring circuit makes the production less embedded in the particularities of its origins and more a spectacular piece of musical theatre, not exactly denying its originating source in local forms of theatre but no longer tied so firmly to them. The international touring theatre product is equally consumable anywhere by any audience, irrespective of language skills or any prior knowledge of its forms and sources. Without context, displaced, travelling only as spectacle, such productions are seen without their meanings and their intentions being communicated. It is not the fault of the production, only of our drive towards processes of transmission.

I want, finally, to turn to an example where King Lear itself marks a different kind of beginning, an example I began to explore previously (Holland 2023). Alexa Alice Joubin has traced King Lear’s ‘special place’ in what she defines as ‘the reparative Shakespeare’, its place in ‘the remedial arts’ (Joubin 2021, pp. 68–69). The example is an American one where King Lear has been used for remedial and reparative purposes quite different from those Joubin explores. It marks a journey that King Lear has made out of the theatre and towards a particular end, performed in US non-theatre contexts in which King Lear has been instrumentalized, used as a deliberately chosen means to provoke discussion about care for the aged in our communities: The King Lear Project of the theatre company Theatre of War.

Founded in 2009 by Bryan Doerries, Theatre of War began by using Greek tragedies, in Doerries’ energized translations, to enable serving military and veterans to open up about war and trauma (see Doerries 2015a, 2015b, 2021). Their performances take a particular template form. Where our experience of theatre is that our discussions take place after the performance, away from the performance space, Theatre of War incorporates the discussion as the aim, the end, of the show, to which the play is simply, but powerfully, a beginning. A reading, not staging, of the play, cut to no more than an hour, is followed by a discussion by members of a panel, which Doerries calls ‘the second chorus’, never theatre workers or scholars, about their immediate response to the play. So, for instance, when, as their first online performance during COVID-19, they turned to Oedipus Rex as a play about plague and the response of the state, with a cast including Oscar Isaac, John Turturro, David Strathairn, and Frances McDormand, the panel included a paramedic from New York, a nurse, and a care-giver. Following the panel, the discussion was open to others in the more than 5000 people on the live-stream to offer their thoughts. Nothing aims to analyze the reading as performance, only to use the reading to create the possibilities of discussion. The reading of Oedipus lasted less than an hour but the whole event lasted over two and a half hours, and I was glued to my laptop screen throughout.

As the company’s website puts it,

The King Lear Project presents streamlined readings of scenes from Shakespeare’s King Lear to engage diverse audiences—including older adults, caregivers, and family members—in open, healing, constructive, discussions about the challenges of aging, dementia, and caring for friends and loved ones. (https://theaterofwar.com/projects/king-lear-project, 6 March 2025).

Though the events are recorded, they are not edited for wider distribution, but I have watched two very different iterations of the King Lear Project, one in Toronto and one in New York at and for the Coler Specialty Hospital for chronic care patients, involving medical personnel and administrators as well as families and patients.3 Both were intensely moving as their responses to the reading opened up areas of feeling that are usually suppressed, just as the Greek tragedy readings enable, for instance, those with war trauma to speak of their pain. There is nothing radical in the actors’ approaches to the play, nothing that makes one pause at a new line-reading or interpretation. But, the play functions as an intense experience precisely because of what it means to that selected audience, for that is the purpose of the event, as those people who are engaged with the pain and compassion of coping with age and dementia, whether as carers, medical team-members, family, or as patients themselves, find what King Lear says to them and discover what hearing the play makes it possible for them to connect with their own experience. This is King Lear made to work for its audiences, asking them to approach it not with reverence or as a closed-off theatre experience but as something directly and powerfully resonating with communities of experience.

In the Toronto performance, one of the first to speak was a retired registered nurse who often gave end-of-life care, as she also did for her own parents and her in-laws. Her first concern, what hit her most, was ‘the caregivers’ fatigue which is so rarely acknowledged, and how exhausted those daughters were’. I have come across many ways in which Goneril and Regan have been reconsidered (see, for example, Kordecki and Koskinen 2010) but I have never encountered that perspective. As she went on, ‘I’m not saying that they were angels…but the fatigue and the expectations that became too much for them to deal with, I have seen that in families and experienced so of that myself as well.’ Her double perspective—as nurse and as daughter—movingly redefines the characters with an intense sympathy. In ways that attempts to rescue Goneril and Regan from stereotyped wickedness cannot do, she can see them afresh, see herself in them. She knows them because she has sat with them and been them. She startlingly remakes the play for us by recognizing it. If I resist my students’ endless desire to make Shakespeare, in the word they love to use, ‘relatable’, this speaker cannot help finding the play meaning so much directly in terms of her experience.

The videos of these performances are packed with such moments, with people close to tears describing how the play speaks to them and is heard—and occasionally misheard—by these audiences, who are indeed members of an audience as listeners rather than as watchers as spectators. More than anything that happens in the fine play-reading, it is the privilege of listening to their responses that stays with me so that I am rewarded for enduring hearing them speak of their profound pain.

If we may sometimes worry why we put ourselves through the pain of watching the play and wonder what the purpose of experiencing it is for and remember Dr Johnson’s avowal that ‘I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor’ (Shakespeare 1765, 6:159), then Theatre of War shows unequivocally that there may be, in some circumstances, a strikingly self-evident purpose to the pain of the experience, that the play can help us learn, and that its work in opening up justifies the end of its plot and in turn makes possible the beginning of exploring that pain together. Both aware of the vast distance between the play and us and of the irrelevance of that distance, the Theatre of War’s approach makes King Lear the starting point in sharing the journey of working with, caring for and sufferingold age and dementia and people working with and caring for them. Just as the King’s Men, in collaboration with the Master of the revels, chose King Lear to open the Christmas court performances, choosing to play it for that very particular audience, so Theatre of War and the organizations that the company works with to present the King Lear Project define the event and its purposes for their carefully chosen audiences.