These Smiling Rogues

Last weekend I went to see King Lear at the New Vic Theatre in Stoke. It was as always an excellent performance and I recommend you all see it.

The play got me thinking, too, about alternative settings to its medieval, pre-Christian royal court. The plot, you remember, centres on an old spoiled king deciding that he's going to hand the job to his daughters' husbands, based on who flatters him most. He intends to retain all the trappings of authority without all the work.

Being an academic in a neoliberal educational paradigm, the scene unfolded before my eyes.

Enter LEAR played by The Spirit of Humanist Education, or perhaps it may be Andrew McGettigan, tired and confused.

'tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age,
Conferring them on younger strengths while we
Unburthen'd crawl toward death.
Not entirely unworldly, he hints at some kind of quantitative assessment of intangible concepts, which we may as well call REF.

Which of you shall we say doth love us most?
That we our largest bounty may extend
Where nature doth with merit challenge.
His Daughters, GONERIL played by Entrepreneurial Managerialism and REGAN played by Ye Modern Real World. They make professions of love but their discourse is rather unconvincingly over the top.

I love you more than words can wield the matter;
Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty;
Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare

Only CORDELIA understands that love (or as we may call it, education for the public good) cannot be measured and will not survive the new regime, but fooled by the sharp-suited executives of the New University, she is expelled for her honesty. She is played by Marina Warner. 

Meanwhile, we have the sub-plot of the two brothers, EDGAR the loving son and his illegitimate half-brother EDMUND. EDMUND appears to care for his father and the fuddy-duddy establishment, but is actually a cold-hearted individualist free-marketeer intent on destroying it from within.

For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to th' creating a whole tribe of fops
Got 'tween asleep and wake? Well then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.
Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
As to th' legitimate. Fine word- 'legitimate'!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top th' legitimate. I grow; I prosper.
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

He is played by David Willetts, AC Grayling or perhaps by Michael Gove. EDGAR, outlawed through Edmund's wiles, is cast out into the cold for his honesty and care, where he becomes POOR TOM weeping and gesticulating over the world's evils. He is, naturally, played by Thomas Docherty. 

Who gives anything to poor Tom? whom the foul fiend hath led
through fire and through flame, through ford and whirlpool, o'er
bog and quagmire; that hath laid knives under his pillow and
halters in his pew, set ratsbane by his porridge, made him proud
of heart, to ride on a bay trotting horse over four-inch'd
bridges, to course his own shadow for a traitor. Bless thy five
wits! Tom 's acold. O, do de, do de, do de. Bless thee from
whirlwinds, star-blasting, and taking! Do poor Tom some charity,
whom the foul fiend vexes.

His ally is the FOOL: beaten, abused and despised for reminding the rulers of their follies, he is played by the Universities and Colleges Union. 

When thou clovest thy crown i'
th' middle and gav'st away both parts, thou bor'st thine ass on
thy back o'er the dirt. Thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown
when thou gav'st thy golden one away. If I speak like myself in
this, let him be whipp'd that first finds it so.
[Sings] Fools had ne'er less grace in a year,
For wise men are grown foppish;
They know not how their wits to wear,
Their manners are so apish.

And so our tragedy unfolds. LEAR hands over the care of his campus to these cold-eyed asset-strippers while assuming that they'll have its best interests at heart. He is sadly mistaken. GONERIL and REGAN have no interest in the trappings of old-school scholarship and proceed to deny him the comforts of the academy: Lear has been an old fool, but they intend to tame him, perhaps with Performance Management Plans or a Bonus Scheme. 

Idle old man,
That still would manage those authorities
That he hath given away! Now, by my life,
Old fools are babes again, and must be us'd
With checks as flatteries, when they are seen abus'd.

For poor old LEAR, thinking his values still have some sway despite selling his realm to managerial forces, will insist on baubles like research time, ethical values and decent staffing levels. This does not go down well – the new rulers don't like dissent or 'inefficiency':

a hundred knights; yes, that on every dream,
Each buzz, each fancy, each complaint, dislike,
He may enguard his dotage with their pow'rs
And hold our lives in mercy.

These troublemaking loiterers have to go, and a Compulsory Redundancy Scheme is initiated.

GONERIL: What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five,
To follow in a house where twice so many
Have a command to tend you?
REGAN: What need one?

LEAR's arguments are as convincing to them as ours on tuition fees and non-STEM subjects are to the BIS. 

O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beast's.

And so LEAR is cast out upon the blasted heath, accompanied only by a faithful FOOL and Poor Tom. Reduced to nothing, LEAR strips off his garments and rages against the indifferent market. 

Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters.
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness.
I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
You owe me no subscription. Then let fall
Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man.
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That will with two pernicious daughters join
Your high-engender'd battles 'gainst a head
So old and white as this! O! O! 'tis foul!

Gradually LEAR begins to understand the folly he has committed, having been reduced to rags and madness and we think there may be a happy ending. The sisters GONERIL and REGAN are revealed to be poisonous betrayers of the realm and kill each other (having disagreed over who will get the bonus, namely EDMUND, representative of illegitimate poor and false values). But it is too late. CORDELIA is DEAD. Poor Tom is restored to his father's good grace just as Thomas Docherty was reinstated, but life will never be the same again. LEAR takes up the Vice-Chancellor's office once more, but quickly passes on: he is out of time. 

And so our revels are ended. We humble players commend our allegory to those in the pit and in the circle and pray that a moral has been drawn.  

I love it when a plan comes together…

I'm feeling optimistic about the world today, which is not normally how people feel after spending the morning in the company of King Lear.

My Shakespeare class is for second-year students (sorry, 'level 5) and takes the form of a two-hour seminar. I knew things would go well when they worked out how to efficiently arrange the desks in a square within minutes. (One of my pet hates is that every room is set out as a school class, with all the students facing the front where the power and authority is meant to be).

We started off by comparing the various editions of the play we had: from 'school' versions, the Norton Anthology edition, the Oxford, the Arden, the RSC and various others - it was a great introduction to the art of textual and editorial studies, which led nicely into a discussion of the play's last lines: spoken by Edgar in my Arden edition, but by Albany in the Oxford version - leading to very different interpretations. (If you like this kind of thing, Claudia Johnson's new book on Austen starts with her trying to decide where a comma should go in a new Austen edition, followed by a virtuoso exposition of the ramifications of making such a decision).

After that, I showed the Nahum Tate's The History of King Lear, his rewrite with a happy ending – Edgar and Cordelia are lovers; she and Lear live happily every after, unlike Shakespeare's text – and we discussed the motivation for this and what it did to interpretation. Tate's version was actually performed far more often than Shakespeare's (which Tate calls 'an unpolished jewel'), and the other tragedies were also fitted with happy resolutions by the Victorians and others, shocked as they were by the arbitrary cruelty of justice not being done.

We discussed the cosmos's indifference to the characters' fates, and whether Lear is ultimately a nihilistic play or one concerned with social justice - all led by the students, who were informed and eager to talk. Certainly one of the most enjoyable sessions I've been in for quite a while.

Also on today: media/cultural studies students are handing in their project proposals. Some are nervous, some want a chat, some want to throw it at me and disappear without a word. We've tried really hard this year to get them to take the proposal seriously and start researching. From looking at the pile, I'd say about 40% have opened a book before writing the proposal. Which is an improvement.

Here's a tip, kids. A dissertation called 'Blogging: is it different in China and the West?' might be considered a little broad and rather vague…

Men/Are as the time is

I was teaching King Lear today, which was hugely enjoyable. The group was talkative and quick to grasp the thornier conundrums (conundra?) raised by the play, though we didn't do much on the classic linguistic/poetical issues.

What we focused on was the kind of universe envisioned by the various characters. To some, it's a Epicurean-Lucretian-humanist world in which (as Edmund says) the stars and the gods do not intervene. To others, it's a humanist-individualist world in which individuals make their own way over the blasted, storm-tossed heath that is life. A third position is that duty, temporarily set aside by those who should understand it (Lear) is restored after its source has been recognised and atonement made. Poor Cordelia, who knows all along yet still dies.

You can understand why Shakespeare's successors hated it: Cordelia's death implies that - despite Noel Edmonds' weirdo claims - there isn't a system of cosmic justice. Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people, and God's not going to turn up and make everything right again. Hence Nahum Tate's version with the happy ending (you know him: he wrote 'While shepherds watched their flocks by night' to which we've all sung hilarious alternative words).

This leads to the final point, the one implied by the title of this post. The despairing lament is that we behave as badly as the time, which I take to mean the moral and social context. A general decay leads to individual dishonour. Perhaps this is why Liam Fox won't resign: why should he individually pay for a minor role in the wider social failure which sees bankers paid billions to turn us to beggars, politicians enrich themselves at our expense, youths take a violent short-cut to material riches?

It's a seductive view, and a common one: the basis of Conservatism is that without restraint, humans will always tend towards selfish individualism, and that the last-age-but-one was Golden. I don't subscribe to it myself, despite the occasionally Eeyore-ish pronouncements you might see here. I tend to think - anarchistically - that removed from hegemonic control, most people are altruistic: just look at the nicer bits of the web, where public data analysis is performed by thousands of geeks, where technical help is always a Tweet away. But I do think that the corrosive effect of the Tories' hatred of government per se has led to corruption on an individual level and on the level of the political class. Like Lear, they take the prestige and the private advantages while publicly decrying the notion of government as a duty and as a public good. Arriving with all the advantages of private wealth and social capital (the same goes for Berlusconi), they can only conceive of government as either oppressing them or enriching them: those of us who have benefitted from the state (education, healthcare etc.) have very different relationships with it. We're Edgar and the Fool - and we're being locked out onto the blasted heath for good.

See? Shakespeare's still got a lot to say, kids!