King Lear: The Grammar of Tragedy

Abstract

Owe& >>, j INCE the eighteenth century, there has developed a large body of critical opinion which has held that the drama of Shakespeare is so conceived that it is more appropriately read as literature than seen as theater. Although the most virulent attack against Shakespeare's dramatic method has come from a playwright unsympathetic to the Elizabethan tradition, similar suggestions have been offered by English critics. Many of Voltaire's objections to Shakespeare's of are reflected in the work of neoclassicists such as Pope, of romanticists such as Lamb, and more recently in that of humanists such as Bradley. Indeed, the consensus of English critical opinion has been that the tragic form of Shakespeare-unlike that of classical Greek drama or that of neoclassical French drama-derives from a poetic vision of such brilliance that no grammar can suffice to translate it into concrete form. The suggestion that the tragedies of Shakespeare cannot be performed is a disturbing one. Certainly, to confine Shakespeare to the purely literary is to engage in the process of aesthetic reduction; it is to deprive his complex drama of its plastic form, as well as to diminish many of its essential contents. The problem in Shakespearian stage history seems to impinge upon the fact that this dramatic form is particularly dependent for its articulation upon a secondary language. Its grammar for tragedy is plastic; in essence, a complex of idea, sound, gesture, costume, setting, and highly inferential suggestion. Unlike the theater of Corneille, Racine, and Moliere, which had its presentational mode codified by the French Academy at the point of creation, the English drama has been subjected to interpretation in a wide variety of theatrical languages. Now the absence of a standard mode of communication-a Shakespearian theatrical convention-has had certain practical advantages. Continued experimentation has provided Shakespearian drama with a strong vitality; but it has also proved to be the root of a'major difficulty. For the absence of a formal linguistic convention-a theatrical language-has made the exposition of certain of the tragedies extremely difficult, if not virtually impossible. One of the plays profoundly affected by the problem of grammar is Shakespeare's Titanic tragedy: King Lear. Like Hamlet, Lear has, since the seventeenth century, been the subject of a continuing critical controversy. Lamb declared that it could not be projected on the stage. A. C. Bradley described Lear as Shakespeare's greatest achievement, but not his best play. Harley GranvilleBarker, while judging the drama to be eminently playworthy, was forced to ad-