King Lear In Film And Novels Essay

, Research Paper

Compare the Various Film and Literature Adaptations of Shakespeare.

The adaptation of Shakespeare’s works has become a common activity in the Twentieth century. His works have constantly influenced literary minds. But recently, and uniquely, created media have too attempted to embrace the universal stories proposed by this ‘father of modern English’. Modern cinema has often strained to shape Shakespeare’s stories into the limited time of the film reel, resulting in dramatic, even sacrilegious to some dedicated thespians, cutting of scenes and characters. Since the post-Freudian saturation of critical essays on these plays, popular media have been able to take this into account, to acknowledge it. This essay proposes that Peter Brook’s version of King Lear is more a critical essay, an interpretation, then a stage adaptation. Narrative adaptation must assume certain aspects of a play, where the author replaces gaps and questions with his or her own answers. As Jane Smiley said, narrative questions the validity of appearances, and changes the perspective of the traditional play .

King Lear is certainly a problematic play. From the outset, it appears conventional, dividing the evil and the good. But upon closer examination, such clearly defined distinctions become dubious. The idea of Lear as the typical protagonist, of evoking sympathy, is difficult. Even from the beginning a materialist valuation of love emerges: “Tell me, my daughters/ Which of you shall we say doth love us most” . The love is for the land . The character of Cordelia is also difficult to confine to a traditional role. Although Lear banishes her from her claim to the kingdom, she rarely is involved in any action, and her lines of forgiveness can be interpreted as submissive, to her father’s regained dominance. Edgar’s motive for bringing his blind father to the cliffs of Dover are unclear. His reason for allowing Gloster to reach the depths of despair, to perform fake suicide, appears mocking and grotesque . Redemption through suffering seems to be the premise of the play, but this results in dissatisfying, tentative reconciliation. Both Brook and Smiley confront different themes in order to resolve or highlight these problems. Brook focuses on the more philosophical concept of the world being meaningless, and therefore cruel, as well as knowledge gained through blindness or madness, through the change of self. Smiley offers a new perspective, excusing Goneril and Regan from their ambiguous reasons for mistreating Lear. She interprets Lear as a brash, misogynist figure, overreacting, perhaps fleeing from his own femininity.

Many scholars in Shakespeare’s works condemn the attempts made to portray King Lear into the mass-market medium of cinema. The time restrictions placed upon a film’s length resulted in extreme editing of the original text, which often led to a loss of the multi-textual meanings, some attempts even losing all coherent significance at all. Many critics considered Peter Brook’s 1971 version of the play to be a disjointed, incoherent piece of art, an endeavour to make a film with roots placed firmly in the theatre. But if one were to compare Brook’s screenplay to his 1962 stage version, a substantial difference would be noted. Brook appears to have acknowledged the problems of adapting a play to suit the screen, and wanted to capture the swiftly shifting associations and evanescent imagery that made Shakespeare’s works so dynamic on stage. The problem lies in changing styles and conventions as lightly and deftly as the mental process, which can be reflected by blank verse but not the consistency of a single image.

Brook considered King Lear as a play in similar vein to the Absurdist dramas of Ionesco and Samuel Beckett and was influenced by Jan Kott’s essay comparing the grotesque elements of Shakespeare’s play to the hopelessness of Beckett’s ‘End Game’ and ‘Act Without Words I’. The world of this Lear, like Beckett’s, is in a constant state of decomposition. Sets made of rusting metal, tattered, worn-out looking costumes, rotten furniture all give his film a haggard, haunted appearance. During the storm, Lear can see dead animals scattered across the land, and later Gloster’s dead corpse is as lifeless as the dead beasts . This can be compared to Beckett’s vision of man as merely another creature, another toy of insignificance. The decay of vision, of tradition, and finally the end of all certainty was made frighteningly material in this understanding of Lear. Brook attempts to avoid the epic audacious appearance of film sets, overbuilt and dramatic in themselves, that seemed to plague Shakespearean films. He wanted to avoid authenticity in their design, as the play is a history play. The film was shot in North Jutland, Denmark, a landscape as abstract as a theatrical production . Brook’s film is anchored by the fear and bombast of Paul Scofield as the protagonist. Like the sets, Scofield’s Lear is a character stripped to its muscles , lacking ornament. The film, and its world, commences with an austere yet meaningful order, which instantly disintegrates once the land is divided. By the end, with Lear descending deeper into emotional and physical disability, Brook’s scene-design choices, and his understanding of his protagonist, come together in a collision of dread and insight.

Several techniques are used to emphasise the bleak and cru