His booted feet upon a felted stool,
his overcoat still on him, he's sat down
from rushing in. His wife avoids his frown.
He booms across the room, "The world's a fool!
A literary man's society?
My work, not fit enough for print, they said?
I've seen more wit that grunted from a sty
Than what they write. Their kind are old and staid."
_______
She thanks the servant for her tea, and looks
with loss upon bright patterns on the rug.
She had dreams to write so many books.
Her husband gives his unlit pipe a plug.
"One day they'll rue my genius, no fear!
Now, go to the piano, will you, dear."
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots Thanks for pointing that line out. I should have written "I've seen more wit that grunted from a sty": now, I've edited it, and it scans properly.
Cheers for the compliment too.
the poem has a domestic feel, propriety, sty or no sty, we are apt to read the paper tonight.
Peter stepped lightly past the campanile and down the steps to the path that leads to Potter's Pond. The still scent of Autumn filled his nostrils as his mind wandered between thoughts of love, commitment, and vanishing freedom. The events that had brought him to this moment seemed to run together. And much like the freshly fallen leaves beneath his feet, there was no way to discern the random brush strokes that now painted his life. He settled on the bank of Potter's Pond. With a certainty that was frightening, Peter began to sort through his thoughts. He knew this moment would decide his future. Peter shuddered as a cool breeze shifted and curled the Purple Lovegrasses that had been transplanted from another place and another time.
It had been a solid run since she had left. Peter made good money and his love life reflected this success. He had been carving the notches on his bed post ever since the divorce. The conquests gave him purpose and stature. His friends, shallow and deep, sought his companionship. The women, more often shallow, knew that Peter was no one to be tied down. And yet, as it is with many young men with money and good looks, the women were content with a just moment or two. Content to be a notch on Peter's bed post. All of this came crashing down like the ashes of a burning pile of leaves when Peter lost his well paying job in the winter of 1982.
Peter remembered dipping his Pyrex tube into the shallow, warm water of Potter's Pond. The entire class had been assigned to gather specimens of microbiological organisms. He looked across the water to the bank on the other side and there she stood. Jean shorts trimmed her long legs and she wore a white halter top. Her auburn hair glistened in the sun, radiating beauty to the world. And she was definitely looking back at him. Peter had come out of his shell, the one that held him back, and had finally scored a beauty. Lisa gave him all that he needed, namely the confidence that he would later use to make good money and to carve those notches. And yet Peter was not ready for this commitment called marriage. He ultimately pushed her away. His hubris led to the divorce that shattered, for a time, his illusions of love.
(i will wrap this up later, i must do some chores right now)
Down the street you can hear her scream youre a disgrace
As she slams the door in his drunken face
And now he stands outside
And all the neighbours start to gossip and drool
He cries oh, girl you must be mad,
What happened to the sweet love you and me had?
Against the door he leans and starts a scene,
And his tears fall and burn the garden green
Originally posted by olderman Peter stepped lightly past the campanile and down the steps to the path that leads to Potter's Pond. The still scent of Autumn filled his nostrils as his mind wandered between thoughts of love, commitment, and vanishing freedom. The events that had brought him to this moment seemed to run together. And much like the freshly fallen leaves beneath his feet, there was no way to discern the random brush strokes that now painted his life. He settled on the bank of Potter's Pond. With a certainty that was frightening, Peter began to sort through his thoughts. He knew this moment would decide his future. Peter shuddered as a cool breeze shifted and curled the Purple Lovegrasses that had been transplanted from another place and another time.
It had been a solid run since she had left. Peter made good money and his love life reflected this success. He had been carving the notches on his bed post ever since the divorce. The conquests gave him purpose and stature. His friends, shallow and deep, sought his companionship. The women, more often shallow, knew that Peter was no one to be tied down. And yet, as it is with many young men with money and good looks, the women were content with a just moment or two. Content to be a notch on Peter's bed post. All of this came crashing down like the ashes of a burning pile of leaves when Peter lost his well paying job in the winter of 1982.
Peter remembered dipping his Pyrex tube into the shallow, warm water of Potter's Pond. The entire class had been assigned to gather specimens of microbiological organisms. He looked across the water to the bank on the other side and there she stood. Jean shorts trimmed her long legs and she wore a white halter top. Her auburn hair glistened in the sun, radiating beauty to the world. And she was definitely looking back at him. Peter had come out of his shell, the one that held him back, and had finally scored a beauty. Lisa gave him all that he needed, namely the confidence that he would later use to make good money and to carve those notches. And yet Peter was not ready for this commitment called marriage. He ultimately pushed her away. His hubris led to the divorce that shattered, for a time, his illusions of love.
A calm settled on Potter's Pond. Peter allowed himself to reflect upon some amusing experience from his past. There was one lover, a dramatic one she was, who had more than once threatened to jump out of the car as they sped along the long stretch of highway between Kansas City and Lawrence. How could he possibly forget? Peter laughed out loud, as if there was a reason to be happy. Peter muffled his chuckles, for this was no time to laugh.
He had met Mary when his luck was down. Mary was different. She shared herself more openly than he had become accustomed in his experience. Mary was not a conquest. The relationship developed slowly, over a year before they were lovers. And Mary had been to the doctor who had told her it was very unlikely she could become pregnant in the near future. And so it was, that they had made love without protection and, indeed, Mary was now two months with a child due in the Spring.
What kind of father would Peter make? His heart was suddenly filled with doubt and uncertainty. He could sit still no longer.
Peter stood up and walked down the hill from Potter's Pond to the gates of Memorial Stadium. This was the same trek he had taken on graduation day seven years before. The wind stung his face with cold barbs and his light jacket was no longer enough protection from the chill. He knew he loved Mary and he knew she wasn't perfect. For once, Peter could see that perfection only existed for a moment in time. Some time in the past, some time ago, on a brilliant summer's day by the banks of Potter's Pond.
Down the street you can hear her scream youre a disgrace
As she slams the door in his drunken face
And now he stands outside
And all the neighbours start to gossip and drool
He cries oh, girl you must be mad,
What happened to the sweet love you and me had?
Against the door he leans and starts a scene,
And his tears fall and burn the garden green
Originally posted by ruby olderman, I really got into your story...it's really great and good.
Thank You Ruby.. thank u very very much
Down the street you can hear her scream youre a disgrace
As she slams the door in his drunken face
And now he stands outside
And all the neighbours start to gossip and drool
He cries oh, girl you must be mad,
What happened to the sweet love you and me had?
Against the door he leans and starts a scene,
And his tears fall and burn the garden green
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots Fine, fine work. You honour this thread with your writing. Thank you, olderman.
thank you very much mr fpc. thank you very much, indeed.
Down the street you can hear her scream youre a disgrace
As she slams the door in his drunken face
And now he stands outside
And all the neighbours start to gossip and drool
He cries oh, girl you must be mad,
What happened to the sweet love you and me had?
Against the door he leans and starts a scene,
And his tears fall and burn the garden green
‘The problem is not one of finding means to speak the verse in front of the camera ... The aural has to be made visual. The poetic texture has itself to be transformed into a visual poetry, into the dynamic organisation of film imagery.’ (Peter Holland, Shakespeare and the Moving Image, p. 56.) Discuss this proposition in relation to King Lear on screen.
In order to provide an investigation into the modes of visual discourse employed in both Grigori Kozintsev’s and Peter Brook’s individual 1970 screen productions of King Lear, it is necessary to begin this assignment by clarifying the theoretical standpoint from which the proposition in the question- heading is based. The speaker (Kozintsev, quoted in Holland, 1999, p. 56) might be thought to imply a semiotic distinction between the foregrounded aural discourse of screen performance- texts in the theatrical or realist, conventionally illusionistic modes of representation and what he terms the “visual poetry” of filmic production. Arguably, all screen performance- texts of King Lear realise a semiotic expansion of the linguistic vocabulary of Shakespeare’s ‘original’, dramatic text, incorporating such paralinguistic, visual signifiers as actors (operating both as ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ signs), facial gestures, body movement, costumes, props, scenery or lighting, as well as aural signifiers such as ‘natural’ voice set and ‘artificial’ inflection, sound effects and music. Kosintsev also seems to acknowledge implicitly that theatrical or realist screen productions of Shakespearean drama, similarly to filmic texts, explore the spatial and focal possibilities of camerawork as an element of visual discourse. ( For example, in Michael Elliott’s 1983 colour television production of King Lear,
Robert Lindsay’s Edmund appears in mid- to close- shot, reciting 1.2. 1- 22 as “verse in front of the camera”, as if he were addressing either an external audience or an internal, textual narratee.)
However, Kozinstev infers that the communication of dramatic meaning in non- filmic screen texts is,
nonetheless, essentially linguistic. Arguably, a televisual screen audience of Elliott’s ‘realist’ production will, similarly to a live theatre audience and even the reader of a dramatic text, extract most information as to its formal and thematic movement via attention to the contextual function in the verbal language of the dramatic dialogue.
Kozintsev’s proposition that “The aural has to be made visual” suggests that cinema audiences constitute a fundamentally ‘visual’ culture. Kozintsev argues (without using an explicitly Structuralist vocabulary) that in the case of filmic texts, the poetic function in the language of the visual discourse should be foregrounded, so that the camera constructs equivalences between motifs,
image- systems and montage- effects, providing, with vivid immediacy, symbolic semiotic signification referential to the underlying thematic preoccupations of the text. The organised repetition of these formal devices determine the visual discourse’s imagistic “dynamic”; Alexander Leggatt cites Kozintsev’s explanation of “the dynamic organisation of film imagery” as the punctuation of the film’s visual discourse with “the rhythms of walking, marching, running.” Leggatt then proposes that the film’s opening sequence (discussed in detail below), depicting a ragged and infirm social underclass trudging deliberately across the barren vastness of “a stony waste- land”, constitutes a proleptic visual metaphor for “Lear’s journeys from house to house and finally into the wilderness, Gloucester’s journey (as he thinks) to Dover, Cordelia’s exile and return.”
Indeed, the opening frame of Kozintsev’s King Lear - an exterior, monochrome mid- shot of two pairs of ragged- trousered legs in toe- less shoes walking over arid, dusty ground - serves as a visual metaphor for the play’s major theme of “unaccommodated man” living a nomadic, transient existence exterior to the civic structures of power (3.4. 98- 99). The camera pulls back and pans across to a long- shot of a procession of gaunt and weary- looking peasants, whose very wretchedness is an indexical signifier, if not an ironic visual metaphor, of state decadence and corruption. A wheeled cart passes from right- to left in the view of the camera; on it lies in a foetal position a sickly child who is being transported by his father whilst in the diligent care of his mother.
This image ostensibly provides metaphorical, symbolic signification of a prevalent thematic preoccupation of the play: the compassion shared by people in the face of adversity, which extends beyond the mere ideology of what Arnold Kettle calls a quasi- feudal loyalty into the ‘natural’ realm of physical, ‘human’ necessity (as is later demonstrated in Edgar’s and Cordelia’s altruistic devotion to their unfortunate fathers). However, the diegetic sound of wheels rattling over stone, and the
plaintive folksong which segues into a meandering, non- diegetic orchestral soundtrack might also poetically symbolise the mechanical, routine futility of existence for this socially disenfranchised peasantry. This is an underclass which worthlessly entertains the delusion of aspiration in what Kettle sees as a hierarchical society; a mid- shot reveals a beggar sounding a (non- diegetic, overdubbed) reveille into a curved horn (the imperative register of which suggests that these people are co-erced into attendance of a state convention). The beggars then, in a series of mid- and long- shots are
shown to fall complacently behind a gathering of more affluent people dressed in fine, hooded cloaks and carrying weaved baskets on their backs; the camera pans slowly from left to right to establish the
gravitation of an entire social strata towards the very symbol of its superstructure: the long- walled castle dominating the horizon at the rear of the frame.
The implied tragedy of these “naked wretches” on the margins of society (3.4.30) could be that although they are as houseless as the bald and ancient stones which dwarf them in a waste land symbolic of the negligent rule of a solipsistic king, they still appear to entertain notions of social definition within a quasi- feudal power structure, rather than appearing to wish to revolt against their miserable plight. These beggars could be be viewed as symbolising visually a whole social class of
politically inactive “men of stones” whose tongues and eyes are conspicuously dull even though the opportunity is present to “use them so/ That heaven’s vault should crack” (5.3. 256- 257), ‘heaven’ being an oppressive system of ‘divine’ kingship. (One can perhaps infer an subversive political statement in the visual discourse in this scene, whether or not consciously intended by Kozintsev himself, on the lumpen- proletarian complacency of the Russian population under Brezhnev’s dictatorial presidency in the late 1960s.)
Perhaps the most visually poetic image in the interior sequence of Lear’s division of his kingdom in 1.1 is a long- range montage shot from the focal perspective of a flaming hearth, at which the aged Lear sits to the right- hand fore of the frame. Yuri Jarvet’s wide- eyed, wild- haired Lear turns his head to the left of the frame, and calls almost nonchalantly behind him to the approaching figures of Goneril, Cordelia and Regan in the background to enquire what roughly translates from Boris Pasternak’s Russian screen dialogue as Shakespeare’s “Tell me, my daughters - / Which of you
shall we say doth love us most?” (1.1.46- 47). As the figures of the three daughters move towards the
centre of the frame in response to Lear’s ‘love- test’ (Goneril and Regan in black and stilted in their
self- conscious deportment; Cordelia almost gliding with what Kettle calls a “natural” grace, within her bright, loose robes, towards her father), the camera pulls towards them, at which point white flames shoot bilious smoke up from the bottom of the frame and cloud the monochrome image with a tortuous, sabled gauze. As the diegetic soundtrack conveys the crackling of burning wood, these combined paralinguistic ‘satellites’ in montage create a poetic motif of fire as symbolising the
destruction of Lear’s old social order. A feminist viewer could choose to interpret the image of the rising flames as symbolising what Coppelia Kahn sees as the oncoming tragic hamartia of Lear, through his contradictory wish, with regard to his daughters, “to have absolute control over those closest to him and to be absolutely dependent on them” .
At the end of this interior scene (culminating in the ostracism of Kent and Cordelia from Lear’s kingdom) follows another sequence which foregrounds to the maximum a visual rather than aural, dramatic- textual representation of such thematic notions in the text as Lear’s careering, heedless movement into folly, the extent of his solipsistic absorption, his misguided reliance on predatory natural forces and his utter disregard of his own populace. A hurriedly backward- moving tracking shot steers in complementary pace to the forward charge of Lear, who dominates the mis- en- scene, flitting through the interior corridors of his castle and choosing his hundred attendant knights. Lear
does not stop to consider his followers but in passing points distractedly at figures in the two flanks either side of him, sometimes without even looking at the men he indicates; this indiscriminate election- process visually symbolises the monarch’s self- preoccupation and lack of mature judgement in affairs of court and state.
The camera cuts to an exterior, mid- to long range tracking shot of Lear being followed through the castle courtyard by his train as he picks out his favoured horses with the same characteristic lack of authoritative concern that he had shown for his own courtiers. Yet when the camera cuts to an interior, left- to right panning shot of Lear’s selection of bloodhounds to join his entourage, the camera is only just above eye level with these sharp- toothed dogs (and possibly from the focal perspective of Lear himself), symbolising Lear’s mistaken preference for predatory, devouring nature
(Goneril and Regan) over the very forces that might nurture him in his old age (Cordelia). After the camera cuts tellingly to a close- up of an agitated vulture, the dynamic juxtaposition of sequent shots increases in torrid pace to the accompaniment of Shostakovich’s insanely climactic, non- diegetic orchestral soundtrack. The camera cuts to a right- to- left panning shot of Lear striding with a maniacal fervour through the courtyard towards wooden steps leading to his castle walls. The camera cuts to a low angle panning shot of vulnerable- looking hooded beggars outside the castle and on the
surrounding hills, kneeling reverently as the camera veers past them; their actions are visually deictic and symbolic of a society’s subservience to absolute monarchialism.
The camera cuts rapidly from a tilt shot of the castle walls blowing fire from their turrets (symbolising the imminent collapse of state order) to a crane shot of masses of peasants throwing themselves
prostrate on the bare earth at the sight of the king: Shostakovich’s music ceases, and the diegetic sound of wind and crackling flames colour the monochrome, mid- range low angle shot of Lear standing tight- lipped in the face of his people with a powerful suspense. What follows is an extraordinary employment of montage by Kozinstev, poetically visualising Lear’s total lack of empathy with the very people who constitute his respectful populace. Standing between two white- flaming turret- torches (symbolising Goneril and Regan?), Lear proclaims “The barbarous Scythian,/ ... shall to my bosom/ Be as well neighboured, pitied and relieved,/ As thou my sometime daughter”. (Transposed from 1.1. 116- 119.) Given that the shots immediately preceding this frame detail with graphic lucidity that Lear’s reverent subjects are, like Scythians, nomadic people living outside the comforts of civic society, King Lear’s proclamation that he sees their kind as repulsively “barbarous” intensifies visually the sense of this monarch’s inability to exact a political rule based on moral, compassionate regard for his less fortunate subjects.
The opening sequence of Part Two of the film (concordant with the beginning of 3.2 of Shakespeare’s dramatic text) orchestrates a dynamic composition of metaphorical visual images, referential to the play’s dominant themes of flux, chaos, “nature” (predatory or nurturing), and barrenness. The first shot in the sequence establishes the scene’s exterior locale; a long- range panning shot hurtles from right to left to reveal a mountainous, obfuscated nightscape of barely discernible form. This blurred image may symbolise the collapse of social form in Lear’s gerontocratic, quasi- feudal kingship- system following the rise of the individualistic Goneril, Regan and Edmund. The following ‘jump’ shots suggest the nocturnal pursuit, by a ravenous wolf, of a boar across decaying vegetation. This image of predatory nature (complemented by the diegetic sounds of the wolf howling and the boar’s
disturbingly human- like roars of fear) symbolises the notion of a new, Hobbesian social order which evolves by preying on weaker nature in the pagan darkness of a godless night.
At the beginning of Peter Brook’s adaptation of 3.2, and similarly to Kozintsev’s version, an exterior, high- angle, grainy monochrome shot depicts horses moving cyclically and hopelessly through a thick cloak of storm clouds; one hears on the diegetic soundtrack the tonal sweep of upwardly screeching winds and torrential rain violently smacking the muddy earth. The camera cuts to a rapid succession of shots alternating from close- ups of Paul Scofield’s Lear wildly steering a horse- driven wagon through the blur of the rain (symbolising his reckless movement towards tragically violent oblivion),
to interior, rapidly tilting mid- shots of Jack MacGowran’s Fool being tossed about the inside of the leaking wagon itself (symbolising the tragic, destructive effect of a protagonist dragging his most loyal followers into danger by his obdurate behaviour). An extreme close up shows the wagon stalling in the earth, cutting to liquid lens shots of murky greyness, through which the shapes of Scofield’s bearded Lear, with arms flailing, can be made out heading at mid- range towards the camera, followed by a staggering Fool. The symbolic portent of these frames is Lear’s wilful charge into
imminent madness; the crash of the wagon at his command symbolises the collapse of a helpless ego
ontologically founded upon spurious notions of the “good divinity” (4.6. 98) of absolute monarchical
control not only over a whole people but also over the “Blasts and fogs” of nature (1.4. 276).
The camera cuts to blackness; on the non- diegetic soundtrack are overdubbed noises of thunderbolts.
The camera cuts to a blurred extreme close- up on Lear’s drenched head and contorted face as he lays
flat on his back on the wet mud; stroboscopic lighting effects simulate lightning flashes. Over the diegetic sound of fiercely falling rain, the camera focuses on Lear’s downturned mouth as he cries in a
protracted wail “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!”: his plaintive roars “rage! blow!” (3.2.1) are interspersed with the non- diegetic sounds of more thunder and the atonal scratching of a low piano string. Although the editing effects and camera work defamiliarize or “make strange” the images on screen, this sequence, by avoiding ‘theatrical’ or ‘realist’ modes of screen production, actually conveys with a more convincing, visually communicative power the text’s theme of Lear’s mental disintegration following the collapse of his old monarchical ideology. Moments later, in a sequence
concordant to 3.4, Lear expresses his tragic anagnorisis, as he comprehends his previous lack of
empathy for mortal humanity and his shared frailty with those who have never known the superflux of wealth. The camera communicates Lear’s realisation of unaccommodated nature when, as the old man’s voice is heard on the diegetic soundtrack softly praying for the “Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,/ That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm”, (3.4. 29- 30), one observes the powerfully poetic rolling shot (from Lear’s focal perspective?) of a pile of extinct, drenched rats.
These creatures appear to have died huddling together for warmth in a formation physically similar to that of the beggars in the hovel of Kozintsev’s film version. Their rigid, outstretched fingers resemble, disturbingly, those of human beings; a close shot of the hands of one rat is followed by a swift cut to a mid- shot of a saturated Lear kneeling at the mouth of the hovel with his naked fingers clasped in prayer, whispering “Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel” (35).
Later, Brook’s directorial depiction of Gloucester’s suicide attempt in 4.6 may conform ostensibly to the realist or theatrical modes of screen production, since the camera simply focuses in a low angle close- up on the blind- eyed face of the old man making his proclamation of farewell to the unbearable turmoil of his mortal suffering (as is also the case in Elliott’s 1983 colour television production). Yet, in Brook’s production, when Gloucester cries “O mighty gods!/ This world I do renounce...” (4.6. 34- 41), this is not merely an image of an actor speaking verse in front of a camera but rather, as Jack Jorgens proposes, “one of the most savagely beautiful shots of a human face ever put on film”. It
might be argued that the shot is visually poetic in that the stark, monochrome image of Gloucester’s butchered and wind- battered face becomes a symbolic signifier for all human anguish, proving a visual testament to his son Edgar’s mournful, concluding couplet in the text, “The oldest hath borne most; we that are young/ Shall never see so much, nor live so long” (5.3. 324- 325).
In conclusion, one can argue that T.S. Eliot’s notion that “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” is exemplified by the visual imagery of by Kozintsev’s and Brook’s versions of King Lear on screen. Both directors visualise that no human being, with or without the material “lendings” (3.4. 100) of “rule/ Interest of territory, cares of state” (1.1.47- 48) is “ague- proof” (4.6.103).
However, perhaps Brook’s film version more than Kozintsev’s visualises the notion of the futility of human ‘nature’, whether composed of “milky
gentleness” (1.4. 320) or bearing a “wolvish visage”
(1.4. 285). The beggars shown to shelter each other from the storm in the hovel of Kozintsev’s
production may visually symbolise Gloucester’s belief that “Full oft ‘tis seen,/ Our means secure us, and our mere defects/ Prove our commodities” (4.1. 20- 22), yet in Brook’s film the “poor, bare, forked animal” nature of “unaccommodated man” (3.4. 99,100) is far more nihilistically symbolised by the image of dead, inconsequential rats, killed for macabre sport by a more predatory nature. Brook organises the symbolic visual imagery of his film to argue that nothing will come from social nothingness but a wretched death. Both films, perhaps, imagistically portray the dynamic of Lear’s
desperate movement across the broad landscape of his psyche, towards a possible realisation of a capacity for humane understanding. But Brook’s version, with its final shots of Lear carrying the dead Cordelia across the bleakness of bare earth, visualises poetically that nothing lasting has come from Lear’s brief understanding of Cordelia’s “nothing” (a love that reverbs no hollowness) except the resounding silence of her death. Silence then swallows up Lear’s last fragile breaths; the silent soundtrack of the film’s dying seconds ultimately symbolises the play’s latent message of “Never, never, never, never, never” (5.3. 307) to any fragile dream of love above political ambition.
BBC Radio/Open University, “King Lear”, dir. Amanda Willett; starring Philip Madoc, Frances
Barber, Catherine Cusack; 1998.
Columbia Pictures/ Royal Shakespeare Company , “King Lear”, dir. Peter Brook; starring Paul Scofield, Irene Worth; 1970.
Elam, Keir, “Foundations: Signs in the Theatre”, in “The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama”, Routledge New Accents Series 1980, pp. 5- 31.
Granada Media, “Laurence Olivier Presents ‘King Lear’,” dir. Michael Elliott; starring Laurence Olivier, John Hurt, Robert Lindsay, Diana Rigg; 1983.
Greenblatt, Stephen, introduction to “King Lear”, in “The Norton Shakespeare”, (ed Greenblatt; Cohen; Howard; Maus), W.W. Norton & Co., New York and London 1997, pp. 2307- 2314.
Hindle, Maurice, “Shakespeare: Text and Performance - Shakespeare on Screen”, Open University 2001.
Holderness, Graham, from “Radical potentiality and institutional closure: Shakespeare in film and television” : quotation from Jack Jorgens, in “Political Shakespeare - Essays in Cultural Materialism” (ed. Jonathan Dollimore; Alan Sinfield), Manchester second edition University Press, 1994, p. 209.
Kahn, Coppelia, from “The Absent Mother in King Lear”, in “Shakespeare: Text and Performance - A Shakespeare Reader: Sources and Criticism” (ed. Richard Danson Brown; Davis Johnson Macmillan/ Open University 2000, p. 260.),
Kettle, Arnold , “From Hamlet to Lear” , in “Shakespeare: Text and Performance - A Shakespeare - A Shakespeare Reader: Sources and Criticism,” pp. 247- 255.
Leggatt, Alexander, “Grigori Kozintsev’s King Lear”, in “Shakespeare: Text and Performance - A Shakespeare Reader: Sources and Criticism”, pp. 266- 270.
Lenfilms/ Tartan Video, “King Lear”, dir. Grigori Kozintsev; starring Yuri Jarvet, Oleg Dal, Valentina Shendrikova; 1970.
Open University, AA306 01 VC06 “King Lear: Text and Performance”, presented by Lizbeth Goodman and Fiona Shaw, 2000.
Regan, Stephen; Martin, Graham, “King Lear”, in “Shakespeare: Text and Performance - Texts and Contexts” , Macmillan/ Open University 2000, pp. 241- 276.
Serpieri, Alessandro, “The Breakdown of Medieval Hierarchy in ‘King Lear’”, in “Shakespearean Tragedy” (ed. John Drakakis), Longman Critical Readers 1992, pp. 84- 95.
Shakespeare, William, “King Lear” (a conflated text, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski), in “The NortonShakespeare” (ed. Greenblatt; Cohen; Howard; Maus), W.W. Norton & Co., New York & London 1997, pp. 2479-2553.
Shakespeare Recording Society/ Caedmon, “King Lear”, dir. Howard Sackler; starring Paul Scofield, Rachel Roberts, Robert Stephens, Cyril Cusack; 1965.
Oh, show beyond the roaring 'o' of horror,
'bomb' and 'nothing'; show beyond that sound
unconscionable, that rapid pound
of rifle fire. Hold the wordsound mirror
of your poetry beyond the fear
that fired from the mouths of those inside
those walls before the shudder like the wide
'No' of death consumed them. Show you hear,
Show you feel their love. Please. Show you hear.
Down the street you can hear her scream youre a disgrace
As she slams the door in his drunken face
And now he stands outside
And all the neighbours start to gossip and drool
He cries oh, girl you must be mad,
What happened to the sweet love you and me had?
Against the door he leans and starts a scene,
And his tears fall and burn the garden green
Originally posted by olderman this forum continues to exceed all expectations..
Now I will have to see the films.... fecker
They're both widely available on VHS and DVD here in the UK and I should imagine they'd be easy to get in the US in good stores or by order, too.
I hope I'm not breaking bbs guidelines by giving links to where you can get them. If I am, sorry, Kat and Sea! It's not my intention to spam any sites but to give details on the two films I wrote about above. I'll edit this post straight away on request.
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots Oh, show beyond the roaring 'o' of horror,
'bomb' and 'nothing'; show beyond that sound
unconscionable, that rapid pound
of rifle fire. Hold the wordsound mirror
of your poetry beyond the fear
that fired from the mouths of those inside
those walls before the shudder like the wide
'No' of death consumed them. Show you hear,
Show you feel their love. Please. Show you hear.
(An offering of words for something I thought there could be no appropriate words for. Made my eyes cry and hot lava pour through my chest.)
When he returns from exile he will see
a mission house built on what was his home,
His followers in strangers' robes, his three
servile wives remarried. Hope has come
to nothing, hope is lost to be recrowned.
The exile in return is less than free:
His children will not know the man disowned
Who'll hoist the past up on the hanging tree.
A square ditch festers on the playing green.
Steel cold. Jagged as hard throat wire.
No, do not be thrown down. What had been
the game of angels ended in that mire.
"You need to edit your writing;
It's long and cumbersome;
The style's just not inviting:
In fact it's slumbersome.
You're quite the Malaprop, you know:
Big words, all misapplied.
From one mistake more errors grow,
and well, my patience died,
I would say, about line three.
To get THERE was a push.
Good prose, when choice, is clear to see
and feel. It's bright, it's lush:
It shows the writer's mind in flight,
not just a clumsy pride.
Try and make your vision bright:
Now, look up ... Open wide...."
Pasta asked me a couple of times to come and read her poems. That's not lurking. That's reading. The phrase "lurking" lacks an objective correlative when spoken in this context; it implies that the speaker's state of mind is in excess of facts as they are. (Read TS Eliot on "Hamlet". Better still, read "Hamlet".)
Do people lurk in Public Libraries when they go to read books? The acquisition of knowledge by reading is greatly sullied when claimed to be a voyeuristic pursuit. If you see a reader as a voyeur, then you must perceive your own writing as squallid: The logic is relentless.
People have the self esteem to respond in the face of adversity with gentility and kindness, though a cruder sensibility would misread such magnanimity as ego. The one word cry of ego against a person generous with words is as an admission of impotent ego in oneself, a projective misidentification. Let the call of "ego" come and fall upon the speaker of that word.
"The worst are full of passionate intensity."
WB Yeats
Comments
his overcoat still on him, he's sat down
from rushing in. His wife avoids his frown.
He booms across the room, "The world's a fool!
A literary man's society?
My work, not fit enough for print, they said?
I've seen more wit that grunted from a sty
Than what they write. Their kind are old and staid."
_______
She thanks the servant for her tea, and looks
with loss upon bright patterns on the rug.
She had dreams to write so many books.
Her husband gives his unlit pipe a plug.
"One day they'll rue my genius, no fear!
Now, go to the piano, will you, dear."
love that line!
Thanks for pointing that line out. I should have written "I've seen more wit that grunted from a sty": now, I've edited it, and it scans properly.
Cheers for the compliment too.
the poem has a domestic feel, propriety, sty or no sty, we are apt to read the paper tonight.
It had been a solid run since she had left. Peter made good money and his love life reflected this success. He had been carving the notches on his bed post ever since the divorce. The conquests gave him purpose and stature. His friends, shallow and deep, sought his companionship. The women, more often shallow, knew that Peter was no one to be tied down. And yet, as it is with many young men with money and good looks, the women were content with a just moment or two. Content to be a notch on Peter's bed post. All of this came crashing down like the ashes of a burning pile of leaves when Peter lost his well paying job in the winter of 1982.
Peter remembered dipping his Pyrex tube into the shallow, warm water of Potter's Pond. The entire class had been assigned to gather specimens of microbiological organisms. He looked across the water to the bank on the other side and there she stood. Jean shorts trimmed her long legs and she wore a white halter top. Her auburn hair glistened in the sun, radiating beauty to the world. And she was definitely looking back at him. Peter had come out of his shell, the one that held him back, and had finally scored a beauty. Lisa gave him all that he needed, namely the confidence that he would later use to make good money and to carve those notches. And yet Peter was not ready for this commitment called marriage. He ultimately pushed her away. His hubris led to the divorce that shattered, for a time, his illusions of love.
(i will wrap this up later, i must do some chores right now)
As she slams the door in his drunken face
And now he stands outside
And all the neighbours start to gossip and drool
He cries oh, girl you must be mad,
What happened to the sweet love you and me had?
Against the door he leans and starts a scene,
And his tears fall and burn the garden green
A calm settled on Potter's Pond. Peter allowed himself to reflect upon some amusing experience from his past. There was one lover, a dramatic one she was, who had more than once threatened to jump out of the car as they sped along the long stretch of highway between Kansas City and Lawrence. How could he possibly forget? Peter laughed out loud, as if there was a reason to be happy. Peter muffled his chuckles, for this was no time to laugh.
He had met Mary when his luck was down. Mary was different. She shared herself more openly than he had become accustomed in his experience. Mary was not a conquest. The relationship developed slowly, over a year before they were lovers. And Mary had been to the doctor who had told her it was very unlikely she could become pregnant in the near future. And so it was, that they had made love without protection and, indeed, Mary was now two months with a child due in the Spring.
What kind of father would Peter make? His heart was suddenly filled with doubt and uncertainty. He could sit still no longer.
Peter stood up and walked down the hill from Potter's Pond to the gates of Memorial Stadium. This was the same trek he had taken on graduation day seven years before. The wind stung his face with cold barbs and his light jacket was no longer enough protection from the chill. He knew he loved Mary and he knew she wasn't perfect. For once, Peter could see that perfection only existed for a moment in time. Some time in the past, some time ago, on a brilliant summer's day by the banks of Potter's Pond.
As she slams the door in his drunken face
And now he stands outside
And all the neighbours start to gossip and drool
He cries oh, girl you must be mad,
What happened to the sweet love you and me had?
Against the door he leans and starts a scene,
And his tears fall and burn the garden green
Thank You Ruby.. thank u very very much
As she slams the door in his drunken face
And now he stands outside
And all the neighbours start to gossip and drool
He cries oh, girl you must be mad,
What happened to the sweet love you and me had?
Against the door he leans and starts a scene,
And his tears fall and burn the garden green
thank you very much mr fpc. thank you very much, indeed.
As she slams the door in his drunken face
And now he stands outside
And all the neighbours start to gossip and drool
He cries oh, girl you must be mad,
What happened to the sweet love you and me had?
Against the door he leans and starts a scene,
And his tears fall and burn the garden green
Part one
‘The problem is not one of finding means to speak the verse in front of the camera ... The aural has to be made visual. The poetic texture has itself to be transformed into a visual poetry, into the dynamic organisation of film imagery.’ (Peter Holland, Shakespeare and the Moving Image, p. 56.) Discuss this proposition in relation to King Lear on screen.
In order to provide an investigation into the modes of visual discourse employed in both Grigori Kozintsev’s and Peter Brook’s individual 1970 screen productions of King Lear, it is necessary to begin this assignment by clarifying the theoretical standpoint from which the proposition in the question- heading is based. The speaker (Kozintsev, quoted in Holland, 1999, p. 56) might be thought to imply a semiotic distinction between the foregrounded aural discourse of screen performance- texts in the theatrical or realist, conventionally illusionistic modes of representation and what he terms the “visual poetry” of filmic production. Arguably, all screen performance- texts of King Lear realise a semiotic expansion of the linguistic vocabulary of Shakespeare’s ‘original’, dramatic text, incorporating such paralinguistic, visual signifiers as actors (operating both as ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ signs), facial gestures, body movement, costumes, props, scenery or lighting, as well as aural signifiers such as ‘natural’ voice set and ‘artificial’ inflection, sound effects and music. Kosintsev also seems to acknowledge implicitly that theatrical or realist screen productions of Shakespearean drama, similarly to filmic texts, explore the spatial and focal possibilities of camerawork as an element of visual discourse. ( For example, in Michael Elliott’s 1983 colour television production of King Lear,
Robert Lindsay’s Edmund appears in mid- to close- shot, reciting 1.2. 1- 22 as “verse in front of the camera”, as if he were addressing either an external audience or an internal, textual narratee.)
However, Kozinstev infers that the communication of dramatic meaning in non- filmic screen texts is,
nonetheless, essentially linguistic. Arguably, a televisual screen audience of Elliott’s ‘realist’ production will, similarly to a live theatre audience and even the reader of a dramatic text, extract most information as to its formal and thematic movement via attention to the contextual function in the verbal language of the dramatic dialogue.
Kozintsev’s proposition that “The aural has to be made visual” suggests that cinema audiences constitute a fundamentally ‘visual’ culture. Kozintsev argues (without using an explicitly Structuralist vocabulary) that in the case of filmic texts, the poetic function in the language of the visual discourse should be foregrounded, so that the camera constructs equivalences between motifs,
image- systems and montage- effects, providing, with vivid immediacy, symbolic semiotic signification referential to the underlying thematic preoccupations of the text. The organised repetition of these formal devices determine the visual discourse’s imagistic “dynamic”; Alexander Leggatt cites Kozintsev’s explanation of “the dynamic organisation of film imagery” as the punctuation of the film’s visual discourse with “the rhythms of walking, marching, running.” Leggatt then proposes that the film’s opening sequence (discussed in detail below), depicting a ragged and infirm social underclass trudging deliberately across the barren vastness of “a stony waste- land”, constitutes a proleptic visual metaphor for “Lear’s journeys from house to house and finally into the wilderness, Gloucester’s journey (as he thinks) to Dover, Cordelia’s exile and return.”
Indeed, the opening frame of Kozintsev’s King Lear - an exterior, monochrome mid- shot of two pairs of ragged- trousered legs in toe- less shoes walking over arid, dusty ground - serves as a visual metaphor for the play’s major theme of “unaccommodated man” living a nomadic, transient existence exterior to the civic structures of power (3.4. 98- 99). The camera pulls back and pans across to a long- shot of a procession of gaunt and weary- looking peasants, whose very wretchedness is an indexical signifier, if not an ironic visual metaphor, of state decadence and corruption. A wheeled cart passes from right- to left in the view of the camera; on it lies in a foetal position a sickly child who is being transported by his father whilst in the diligent care of his mother.
This image ostensibly provides metaphorical, symbolic signification of a prevalent thematic preoccupation of the play: the compassion shared by people in the face of adversity, which extends beyond the mere ideology of what Arnold Kettle calls a quasi- feudal loyalty into the ‘natural’ realm of physical, ‘human’ necessity (as is later demonstrated in Edgar’s and Cordelia’s altruistic devotion to their unfortunate fathers). However, the diegetic sound of wheels rattling over stone, and the
plaintive folksong which segues into a meandering, non- diegetic orchestral soundtrack might also poetically symbolise the mechanical, routine futility of existence for this socially disenfranchised peasantry. This is an underclass which worthlessly entertains the delusion of aspiration in what Kettle sees as a hierarchical society; a mid- shot reveals a beggar sounding a (non- diegetic, overdubbed) reveille into a curved horn (the imperative register of which suggests that these people are co-erced into attendance of a state convention). The beggars then, in a series of mid- and long- shots are
shown to fall complacently behind a gathering of more affluent people dressed in fine, hooded cloaks and carrying weaved baskets on their backs; the camera pans slowly from left to right to establish the
gravitation of an entire social strata towards the very symbol of its superstructure: the long- walled castle dominating the horizon at the rear of the frame.
The implied tragedy of these “naked wretches” on the margins of society (3.4.30) could be that although they are as houseless as the bald and ancient stones which dwarf them in a waste land symbolic of the negligent rule of a solipsistic king, they still appear to entertain notions of social definition within a quasi- feudal power structure, rather than appearing to wish to revolt against their miserable plight. These beggars could be be viewed as symbolising visually a whole social class of
politically inactive “men of stones” whose tongues and eyes are conspicuously dull even though the opportunity is present to “use them so/ That heaven’s vault should crack” (5.3. 256- 257), ‘heaven’ being an oppressive system of ‘divine’ kingship. (One can perhaps infer an subversive political statement in the visual discourse in this scene, whether or not consciously intended by Kozintsev himself, on the lumpen- proletarian complacency of the Russian population under Brezhnev’s dictatorial presidency in the late 1960s.)
Perhaps the most visually poetic image in the interior sequence of Lear’s division of his kingdom in 1.1 is a long- range montage shot from the focal perspective of a flaming hearth, at which the aged Lear sits to the right- hand fore of the frame. Yuri Jarvet’s wide- eyed, wild- haired Lear turns his head to the left of the frame, and calls almost nonchalantly behind him to the approaching figures of Goneril, Cordelia and Regan in the background to enquire what roughly translates from Boris Pasternak’s Russian screen dialogue as Shakespeare’s “Tell me, my daughters - / Which of you
shall we say doth love us most?” (1.1.46- 47). As the figures of the three daughters move towards the
centre of the frame in response to Lear’s ‘love- test’ (Goneril and Regan in black and stilted in their
self- conscious deportment; Cordelia almost gliding with what Kettle calls a “natural” grace, within her bright, loose robes, towards her father), the camera pulls towards them, at which point white flames shoot bilious smoke up from the bottom of the frame and cloud the monochrome image with a tortuous, sabled gauze. As the diegetic soundtrack conveys the crackling of burning wood, these combined paralinguistic ‘satellites’ in montage create a poetic motif of fire as symbolising the
destruction of Lear’s old social order. A feminist viewer could choose to interpret the image of the rising flames as symbolising what Coppelia Kahn sees as the oncoming tragic hamartia of Lear, through his contradictory wish, with regard to his daughters, “to have absolute control over those closest to him and to be absolutely dependent on them” .
does not stop to consider his followers but in passing points distractedly at figures in the two flanks either side of him, sometimes without even looking at the men he indicates; this indiscriminate election- process visually symbolises the monarch’s self- preoccupation and lack of mature judgement in affairs of court and state.
The camera cuts to an exterior, mid- to long range tracking shot of Lear being followed through the castle courtyard by his train as he picks out his favoured horses with the same characteristic lack of authoritative concern that he had shown for his own courtiers. Yet when the camera cuts to an interior, left- to right panning shot of Lear’s selection of bloodhounds to join his entourage, the camera is only just above eye level with these sharp- toothed dogs (and possibly from the focal perspective of Lear himself), symbolising Lear’s mistaken preference for predatory, devouring nature
(Goneril and Regan) over the very forces that might nurture him in his old age (Cordelia). After the camera cuts tellingly to a close- up of an agitated vulture, the dynamic juxtaposition of sequent shots increases in torrid pace to the accompaniment of Shostakovich’s insanely climactic, non- diegetic orchestral soundtrack. The camera cuts to a right- to- left panning shot of Lear striding with a maniacal fervour through the courtyard towards wooden steps leading to his castle walls. The camera cuts to a low angle panning shot of vulnerable- looking hooded beggars outside the castle and on the
surrounding hills, kneeling reverently as the camera veers past them; their actions are visually deictic and symbolic of a society’s subservience to absolute monarchialism.
The camera cuts rapidly from a tilt shot of the castle walls blowing fire from their turrets (symbolising the imminent collapse of state order) to a crane shot of masses of peasants throwing themselves
prostrate on the bare earth at the sight of the king: Shostakovich’s music ceases, and the diegetic sound of wind and crackling flames colour the monochrome, mid- range low angle shot of Lear standing tight- lipped in the face of his people with a powerful suspense. What follows is an extraordinary employment of montage by Kozinstev, poetically visualising Lear’s total lack of empathy with the very people who constitute his respectful populace. Standing between two white- flaming turret- torches (symbolising Goneril and Regan?), Lear proclaims “The barbarous Scythian,/ ... shall to my bosom/ Be as well neighboured, pitied and relieved,/ As thou my sometime daughter”. (Transposed from 1.1. 116- 119.) Given that the shots immediately preceding this frame detail with graphic lucidity that Lear’s reverent subjects are, like Scythians, nomadic people living outside the comforts of civic society, King Lear’s proclamation that he sees their kind as repulsively “barbarous” intensifies visually the sense of this monarch’s inability to exact a political rule based on moral, compassionate regard for his less fortunate subjects.
The opening sequence of Part Two of the film (concordant with the beginning of 3.2 of Shakespeare’s dramatic text) orchestrates a dynamic composition of metaphorical visual images, referential to the play’s dominant themes of flux, chaos, “nature” (predatory or nurturing), and barrenness. The first shot in the sequence establishes the scene’s exterior locale; a long- range panning shot hurtles from right to left to reveal a mountainous, obfuscated nightscape of barely discernible form. This blurred image may symbolise the collapse of social form in Lear’s gerontocratic, quasi- feudal kingship- system following the rise of the individualistic Goneril, Regan and Edmund. The following ‘jump’ shots suggest the nocturnal pursuit, by a ravenous wolf, of a boar across decaying vegetation. This image of predatory nature (complemented by the diegetic sounds of the wolf howling and the boar’s
disturbingly human- like roars of fear) symbolises the notion of a new, Hobbesian social order which evolves by preying on weaker nature in the pagan darkness of a godless night.
At the beginning of Peter Brook’s adaptation of 3.2, and similarly to Kozintsev’s version, an exterior, high- angle, grainy monochrome shot depicts horses moving cyclically and hopelessly through a thick cloak of storm clouds; one hears on the diegetic soundtrack the tonal sweep of upwardly screeching winds and torrential rain violently smacking the muddy earth. The camera cuts to a rapid succession of shots alternating from close- ups of Paul Scofield’s Lear wildly steering a horse- driven wagon through the blur of the rain (symbolising his reckless movement towards tragically violent oblivion),
to interior, rapidly tilting mid- shots of Jack MacGowran’s Fool being tossed about the inside of the leaking wagon itself (symbolising the tragic, destructive effect of a protagonist dragging his most loyal followers into danger by his obdurate behaviour). An extreme close up shows the wagon stalling in the earth, cutting to liquid lens shots of murky greyness, through which the shapes of Scofield’s bearded Lear, with arms flailing, can be made out heading at mid- range towards the camera, followed by a staggering Fool. The symbolic portent of these frames is Lear’s wilful charge into
imminent madness; the crash of the wagon at his command symbolises the collapse of a helpless ego
ontologically founded upon spurious notions of the “good divinity” (4.6. 98) of absolute monarchical
control not only over a whole people but also over the “Blasts and fogs” of nature (1.4. 276).
The camera cuts to a blurred extreme close- up on Lear’s drenched head and contorted face as he lays
flat on his back on the wet mud; stroboscopic lighting effects simulate lightning flashes. Over the diegetic sound of fiercely falling rain, the camera focuses on Lear’s downturned mouth as he cries in a
protracted wail “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!”: his plaintive roars “rage! blow!” (3.2.1) are interspersed with the non- diegetic sounds of more thunder and the atonal scratching of a low piano string. Although the editing effects and camera work defamiliarize or “make strange” the images on screen, this sequence, by avoiding ‘theatrical’ or ‘realist’ modes of screen production, actually conveys with a more convincing, visually communicative power the text’s theme of Lear’s mental disintegration following the collapse of his old monarchical ideology. Moments later, in a sequence
concordant to 3.4, Lear expresses his tragic anagnorisis, as he comprehends his previous lack of
empathy for mortal humanity and his shared frailty with those who have never known the superflux of wealth. The camera communicates Lear’s realisation of unaccommodated nature when, as the old man’s voice is heard on the diegetic soundtrack softly praying for the “Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,/ That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm”, (3.4. 29- 30), one observes the powerfully poetic rolling shot (from Lear’s focal perspective?) of a pile of extinct, drenched rats.
These creatures appear to have died huddling together for warmth in a formation physically similar to that of the beggars in the hovel of Kozintsev’s film version. Their rigid, outstretched fingers resemble, disturbingly, those of human beings; a close shot of the hands of one rat is followed by a swift cut to a mid- shot of a saturated Lear kneeling at the mouth of the hovel with his naked fingers clasped in prayer, whispering “Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel” (35).
Later, Brook’s directorial depiction of Gloucester’s suicide attempt in 4.6 may conform ostensibly to the realist or theatrical modes of screen production, since the camera simply focuses in a low angle close- up on the blind- eyed face of the old man making his proclamation of farewell to the unbearable turmoil of his mortal suffering (as is also the case in Elliott’s 1983 colour television production). Yet, in Brook’s production, when Gloucester cries “O mighty gods!/ This world I do renounce...” (4.6. 34- 41), this is not merely an image of an actor speaking verse in front of a camera but rather, as Jack Jorgens proposes, “one of the most savagely beautiful shots of a human face ever put on film”. It
might be argued that the shot is visually poetic in that the stark, monochrome image of Gloucester’s butchered and wind- battered face becomes a symbolic signifier for all human anguish, proving a visual testament to his son Edgar’s mournful, concluding couplet in the text, “The oldest hath borne most; we that are young/ Shall never see so much, nor live so long” (5.3. 324- 325).
In conclusion, one can argue that T.S. Eliot’s notion that “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” is exemplified by the visual imagery of by Kozintsev’s and Brook’s versions of King Lear on screen. Both directors visualise that no human being, with or without the material “lendings” (3.4. 100) of “rule/ Interest of territory, cares of state” (1.1.47- 48) is “ague- proof” (4.6.103).
However, perhaps Brook’s film version more than Kozintsev’s visualises the notion of the futility of human ‘nature’, whether composed of “milky
gentleness” (1.4. 320) or bearing a “wolvish visage”
(1.4. 285). The beggars shown to shelter each other from the storm in the hovel of Kozintsev’s
production may visually symbolise Gloucester’s belief that “Full oft ‘tis seen,/ Our means secure us, and our mere defects/ Prove our commodities” (4.1. 20- 22), yet in Brook’s film the “poor, bare, forked animal” nature of “unaccommodated man” (3.4. 99,100) is far more nihilistically symbolised by the image of dead, inconsequential rats, killed for macabre sport by a more predatory nature. Brook organises the symbolic visual imagery of his film to argue that nothing will come from social nothingness but a wretched death. Both films, perhaps, imagistically portray the dynamic of Lear’s
desperate movement across the broad landscape of his psyche, towards a possible realisation of a capacity for humane understanding. But Brook’s version, with its final shots of Lear carrying the dead Cordelia across the bleakness of bare earth, visualises poetically that nothing lasting has come from Lear’s brief understanding of Cordelia’s “nothing” (a love that reverbs no hollowness) except the resounding silence of her death. Silence then swallows up Lear’s last fragile breaths; the silent soundtrack of the film’s dying seconds ultimately symbolises the play’s latent message of “Never, never, never, never, never” (5.3. 307) to any fragile dream of love above political ambition.
_____
I got 98% for that fecker.
Barber, Catherine Cusack; 1998.
Columbia Pictures/ Royal Shakespeare Company , “King Lear”, dir. Peter Brook; starring Paul Scofield, Irene Worth; 1970.
Elam, Keir, “Foundations: Signs in the Theatre”, in “The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama”, Routledge New Accents Series 1980, pp. 5- 31.
Granada Media, “Laurence Olivier Presents ‘King Lear’,” dir. Michael Elliott; starring Laurence Olivier, John Hurt, Robert Lindsay, Diana Rigg; 1983.
Greenblatt, Stephen, introduction to “King Lear”, in “The Norton Shakespeare”, (ed Greenblatt; Cohen; Howard; Maus), W.W. Norton & Co., New York and London 1997, pp. 2307- 2314.
Hindle, Maurice, “Shakespeare: Text and Performance - Shakespeare on Screen”, Open University 2001.
Holderness, Graham, from “Radical potentiality and institutional closure: Shakespeare in film and television” : quotation from Jack Jorgens, in “Political Shakespeare - Essays in Cultural Materialism” (ed. Jonathan Dollimore; Alan Sinfield), Manchester second edition University Press, 1994, p. 209.
Kahn, Coppelia, from “The Absent Mother in King Lear”, in “Shakespeare: Text and Performance - A Shakespeare Reader: Sources and Criticism” (ed. Richard Danson Brown; Davis Johnson Macmillan/ Open University 2000, p. 260.),
Kettle, Arnold , “From Hamlet to Lear” , in “Shakespeare: Text and Performance - A Shakespeare - A Shakespeare Reader: Sources and Criticism,” pp. 247- 255.
Leggatt, Alexander, “Grigori Kozintsev’s King Lear”, in “Shakespeare: Text and Performance - A Shakespeare Reader: Sources and Criticism”, pp. 266- 270.
Lenfilms/ Tartan Video, “King Lear”, dir. Grigori Kozintsev; starring Yuri Jarvet, Oleg Dal, Valentina Shendrikova; 1970.
Open University, AA306 01 VC06 “King Lear: Text and Performance”, presented by Lizbeth Goodman and Fiona Shaw, 2000.
Regan, Stephen; Martin, Graham, “King Lear”, in “Shakespeare: Text and Performance - Texts and Contexts” , Macmillan/ Open University 2000, pp. 241- 276.
Serpieri, Alessandro, “The Breakdown of Medieval Hierarchy in ‘King Lear’”, in “Shakespearean Tragedy” (ed. John Drakakis), Longman Critical Readers 1992, pp. 84- 95.
Shakespeare, William, “King Lear” (a conflated text, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski), in “The NortonShakespeare” (ed. Greenblatt; Cohen; Howard; Maus), W.W. Norton & Co., New York & London 1997, pp. 2479-2553.
Shakespeare Recording Society/ Caedmon, “King Lear”, dir. Howard Sackler; starring Paul Scofield, Rachel Roberts, Robert Stephens, Cyril Cusack; 1965.
'bomb' and 'nothing'; show beyond that sound
unconscionable, that rapid pound
of rifle fire. Hold the wordsound mirror
of your poetry beyond the fear
that fired from the mouths of those inside
those walls before the shudder like the wide
'No' of death consumed them. Show you hear,
Show you feel their love. Please. Show you hear.
this forum continues to exceed all expectations..
Now I will have to see the films.... fecker
As she slams the door in his drunken face
And now he stands outside
And all the neighbours start to gossip and drool
He cries oh, girl you must be mad,
What happened to the sweet love you and me had?
Against the door he leans and starts a scene,
And his tears fall and burn the garden green
They're both widely available on VHS and DVD here in the UK and I should imagine they'd be easy to get in the US in good stores or by order, too.
I hope I'm not breaking bbs guidelines by giving links to where you can get them. If I am, sorry, Kat and Sea! It's not my intention to spam any sites but to give details on the two films I wrote about above. I'll edit this post straight away on request.
Okay, for the Kozintsev "King Lear":
http://www.learmedia.ca/product_info.php/products_id/29
And Brook:
http://www.learmedia.ca/product_info.php/products_id/30
(An offering of words for something I thought there could be no appropriate words for. Made my eyes cry and hot lava pour through my chest.)
a mission house built on what was his home,
His followers in strangers' robes, his three
servile wives remarried. Hope has come
to nothing, hope is lost to be recrowned.
The exile in return is less than free:
His children will not know the man disowned
Who'll hoist the past up on the hanging tree.
Steel cold. Jagged as hard throat wire.
No, do not be thrown down. What had been
the game of angels ended in that mire.
It's long and cumbersome;
The style's just not inviting:
In fact it's slumbersome.
You're quite the Malaprop, you know:
Big words, all misapplied.
From one mistake more errors grow,
and well, my patience died,
I would say, about line three.
To get THERE was a push.
Good prose, when choice, is clear to see
and feel. It's bright, it's lush:
It shows the writer's mind in flight,
not just a clumsy pride.
Try and make your vision bright:
Now, look up ... Open wide...."
Mmmmfffmmm mmffffmmmmfff mfffmfmm
mmmffffmmmffff fmmmmmfffff fffmmmffff
...
AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Mffffmmmhhhhhhhhh!!!!! MHHHHFFFFMMMFFF
MFFFFFFFMMMMMMM!!!"
Do people lurk in Public Libraries when they go to read books? The acquisition of knowledge by reading is greatly sullied when claimed to be a voyeuristic pursuit. If you see a reader as a voyeur, then you must perceive your own writing as squallid: The logic is relentless.
People have the self esteem to respond in the face of adversity with gentility and kindness, though a cruder sensibility would misread such magnanimity as ego. The one word cry of ego against a person generous with words is as an admission of impotent ego in oneself, a projective misidentification. Let the call of "ego" come and fall upon the speaker of that word.
"The worst are full of passionate intensity."
WB Yeats