'Their Story is One of Unrelieved Horror'

“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.”