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Highlights
id867560467
My favorite thing about King Lear, as someone who is hardly an expert in Shakespeare but has taught it for years, is that it has neither villains and nor heroes. Edmund gives a classic and compelling “I’m a villain” speech, but his plan could not succeed without Gloucester’s gullibility. Regan and Goneril connive and instigate, but they would be powerless without the fecklessness and complicity of their ambitious but morally weak husbands Cornwall and Albany. Only this year did Lear snap into clarify for me as a political caution not about bad actors, but about those who fail to stop them.
✏️ Thinking about the idea of a story exploring how people could act villainous, but aren’t truly villains insomuch that what matters are the people that fall to stand up to them. 👓 storytelling politics 🔗 View Highlight
id867561076
I find myself dwelling on the end of Act I, Scene 4. Goneril has announced to her husband Albany the pretext on which she will dispossess and betray her father, spinning a fantasy of violent threat where none exists. Here, in this moment, the cassus belli of looming catastrophe is made plain. Albany, with the power to check his wife’s plot, sees that something is wrong. But he hems and he haws: “Well, well;” he mutters, “th’ event,” meaning something like, “I guess we’ll see what happens.”