“With music of flutes and scent of roses, and plenty of sweetmeats and amber wine, and not a cloud in the sky, we can just support the cruel burden of existence. In a word, we are civilized.”
No creampuff
wrote this. The author is Max Beerbohm, reviewing a production of King Lear staged at the Haymarket Theatre in London. His review was published in
the September 18, 1909 issue of The
Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art. Beerbohm’s larger
point is that a play as bleak as King
Lear is a tough sell with audiences seeking whimsy, affirmation and a happy
ending. The passage above is preceded by these lines:
“Tragedy is
not popular; and the most horribly tragic of all Shakespeare’s plays has been,
in recent times, the least popular. In
the lusty Tudor days, before ‘nerves’ had been heard of, men were able to revel
in the gloomiest exhibitions. They were not afraid of the dark. We are. They liked
to have their blood curdled. We have no blood to spare for that process, thank
you. Thunder and lightning, barren heaths cowering under starless skies, exile
and despair, the breaking heart, the tottering reason, treachery most foul,
death sudden or lingering, seemed to the Elizabethan very jolly indeed.”
He might be
describing our world, in contrast to that of our forebears’. Last year, Ted Gioia noted our lack of a tragic sense:
“The essence
of tragedy as a narrative device is that you’ve created your own mess (perhaps
without realizing it), and now you face the consequences. The digital age, with
its technocratic and plutocratic optimism, is incapable of grasping this view
of human frailty.”
He could be referring to Lear and those among us who fail to recognize that we create most of
our own troubles. Gioia goes on to cite Lear
and other dramas: “The great tragedies (Macbeth,
Oedipus, King Lear, etc.) aren’t much different from the leading news
stories today—we simply haven’t been taught to see the connections.”
Beerbohm was
theater critic for the Saturday Review
from 1898, when he succeeded George Bernard Shaw, until 1910. This was the first
staging of Lear he had ever seen.
Hazlitt
judged Lear the best of all
Shakespeare’s plays, “the one in which he was the most in earnest.” Dr. Johnson
wrote: “There is perhaps no play which keeps the attention so strongly fixed;
which so much agitates our passions and interests our curiosity.” Auden
famously called it “unstageable.” Beerbohm criticizes some of the sets and
acting, but seems almost overwhelmed by the play itself:
“Whereas
Hamlet and Macbeth are both of them modern and ‘sympathetic’ persons, in King Lear all the characters except
Cordelia, the good and thee bad alike, are savages; and their story is one of
unrelieved horror.”
1 comment:
When someone asked the ultra-leftist I.F. Stone how he could continue to revere a slave owning hypocrite like Thomas Jefferson, Stone replied, "Because history is a tragedy and not a melodrama."
Truly, these days, in just about every area of life, we love the one and have no stomach for the other.
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