The play now recognised as the pinnacle of Shakespeare’s work was once thought to be embarrassing and excessive. Is it all about power? And do you need to be superhuman to play such a demanding lead part?
King Lear, as Jonathan Croall notes in this illuminating survey of modern approaches to the play in performance, grew hugely in popularity during the 20th century, and now eclipses Hamlet as the pinnacle of Shakespeare’s work, his ultimate statement about the human condition. This has especially been true in the British theatre since Paul Scofield’s granite performance for Peter Brook in 1962, when the play, far from representing some kind of primitive, barbaric past, seemed suddenly, frighteningly, to speak of our own time, godless, loveless, alienated, arbitrary.
It had been a long journey to pre-eminence. For at least two centuries after Shakespeare’s death it was regarded as both unsavoury and unplayable. Eighteenth-century critics such as Hazlitt thought it shouldn’t be seen on stage and should only be contemplated in the privacy of the study, in the theatre of the mind. Actors tended to agree about its unplayablity and set about customising it, formally and morally. Its barbarities were abolished (no eye-gouging for Gloucester), its heartlessness tempered (neither Lear nor Cordelia died at the end), its idiosyncrasies expunged (the Fool simply removed).
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