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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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You're got a brother, Christopher and Sean and like a mamba guard,
he lets it's in the flower, best my poison, but I'm fired and I.
entitled opinions has gone five years without doing a show on Shakespeare.
Believe it or not.
But here we are at long last with a special guest in the studio ready to brave this mountain range.
Because that's what Shakespeare is.
A vast rugged mountain range with no purgatorial terraces, no garden of Eden at the summit.
No celestial spheres hovering above, just the next peak in the next valley, up and down,
across the ice and Arctic snow, through craters and crevices.
Across more ice and more snow, along forests and lakes going and going and never getting there, wherever there may be.
I agree with T. S. Eliot that Dante and Shakespeare, "share the modern world between them."
There is no third, end quote.
But Dante is vertically aligned while Shakespeare is laterally dispersed.
That's the main difference between them and don't let anyone tell you otherwise because, well,
just take my entitled opinion on it.
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Looks so good.
It looks so cool.
Your planter lives into the probe.
It don't give end of the view.
You know, when I sit down to write these introductory monologues, usually just before I
declaim them, I typically have only a vague idea of what I want to say or where my subconscious is going to take me.
Today, for some reason, my mind is all cut up with the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Why?
Because Shakespeare made him nervous.
It's a tribute to Wittgenstein's seriousness as a philosopher that he was genuinely troubled by the most quintessential of all dramatic poets.
Here are a few quotes from Wittgenstein.
I believe an enormous amount of praise has been lavished on Shakespeare without understanding and for the wrong reasons by a thousand professors of literature.
Another quote.
You have to accept him as he is if you are going to be able to admire him properly.
In the way you accept a piece of scenery, for example, just as it is,
My failure to understand Shakespeare could then be explained by my inability to read him easily.
That is, as one views a splendid piece of scenery.
Yet another quote.
If Shakespeare is great as he is said to be, then it must be possible to say of him,
"It's all wrong.
Things aren't like that at all."
And yet at the same time, it's quite right, according to a law of its own.
Beethoven's great heart.
Yes, but nobody could speak of Shakespeare's great heart.
Quote, "I am deeply suspicious of most of Shakespeare's admirers."
Now Wittgenstein probably meant all those admirers who surrounded him at Cambridge University where he spent many years teaching.
And perhaps one can't blame him for that.
The quote continues, "The misfortune is that he, Shakespeare, stands by himself so that one can only place him by placing him wrongly."
Wittgenstein was obsessed with categories in his philosophy, or with what he called category mistakes.
His remarks about Shakespeare show the consternation of a philosopher who fails to grasp Shakespeare
who cannot place him or categorize him because he, Shakespeare, is not a member of a species or genus, but is altogether sue-genities.
Quoteing him again, "I do not believe that Shakespeare can be set alongside any other poet.
Was he perhaps a creator of language rather than a poet?"
Not likely Ludwig, to begin with, most poets are creators of language.
Most good poets, anyway.
Secondly, Shakespeare created a lot more than language.
He created characters and storylines, for example.
And thirdly, he probably can be set alongside other poets.
Wittgenstein and Shakespeare were certainly antithetical in temperament, thought, and the use of language, like many philosophers,
of logic.
Wittgenstein was through and through inhibited.
He made of his inhibitions of rigorous philosophy as he struggled to free language, from the stifling straight jacket into which he himself had confined it in his tractatus.
Shakespeare, on the other hand, was one of the most uninhibited poets who ever wrote.
That is why Shakespeare, I'm sorry, not Shakespeare, Wittgenstein declared of Shakespeare, with puzzlement.
I can only stare in wonder at Shakespeare, never do anything with him.
Perhaps Wittgenstein would have done better to actually read one or two plays closely, rather than try to arrive as a synthetic understanding of the corpus as a whole.
For that was his problem with Shakespeare, he sought to situate and conceptualize the whole.
But Shakespeare vanishes behind a great multiplicity of masks, leaving us all bewildered when it comes to the same thing.
If Shakespeare is great, his greatness is displayed only in the whole corpus of his plays, which create their own language.
Wrong again, Ludwig, you're simply wrong about that.
If Shakespeare is great, he is great play by play, saluliqui by saluliqui, sonnet by sonnet.
His greatness consists in the fact that he took care of the parts and let the corpus take care of itself.
My guest today is Stephen Orgle, a professor here at Stanford and one of the world's most eminent scholars of English Renaissance literature and theater.
He has produced critical editions of various Shakespeare plays, and he has authored several scholarly books on Shakespeare, the most recent of which include imagining Shakespeare and the most
authentic Shakespeare, both published in the past decade.
Stephen and I agreed beforehand that we would not stray into the wilderness of Shakespeare's whole corpus today, but would spend most of our
our focusing on only one play, namely King Lear, Stephen, welcome to the program.
Thank you, thank you.
I love your Wittgenstein quotes. Matthew Arnold wrote a sonnet on Shakespeare that really could have been addressed to Wittgenstein.
It begins "others abide our question, thou art free. We ask and ask, thou smileest and art still. You really can't pin him down."
Wittgenstein's question is one that you might ask about a playwright like Beckett, like Samuel Beckett or like Ben Johnson.
But it just doesn't make sense about Shakespeare because there isn't some grand scheme behind the work.
It can't be elaborated into or reduced to a philosophical position.
Shakespeare almost answers Wittgenstein himself. Hamlet says to Horatio that there are more things in heaven and earth than our dreamt of in philosophy.
Well, the "ure" is not Horatio's philosophy. It's your philosophy.
It's philosophy. It's Wittgenstein's philosophy too. Shakespeare is interested in everything, and he's not interested in systematizing everything.
One of the reasons the plays are so endlessly fascinating is precisely that they seem not to take positions or to take so many contradictory ones.
He seems to have radically different loyalties to be able to empathize with opposing attitudes all at the same time.
You're always asking which side he's on in plays like Henry IV or Richard II or especially Coriolanus.
Is Cleopatra good or bad? Is Antony right or wrong? What should Antony be doing?
Most of all, what should I be feeling about all this? There aren't answers to questions like this, and there aren't because life is more complicated than that, and so is Shakespeare.
Shiloch is the villain of the merchant of Venice, but Shakespeare makes an awfully good case for him.
Portia is the heroine, but she comes across as awfully unsympathetic at a number of points.
Edmund in King Lear is certainly the villain, but he's the most exciting figure in the play, and he's often played as very attractive.
You always feel that Ben Johnson is completely in control of his characters, but Shakespeare's characters don't seem to be predetermined in that way.
He seems to be interested in following out all their possibilities, and they often act very unexpectedly.
I'm sympathetic to that. I would like to ask you however, whether we don't have to buy into Wittgenstein's puzzle mode about Shakespeare from the philosophical point of view.
That's an old story. It goes back to Plato and his problem with the poets and so forth.
In that sense, Wittgenstein is very much an heir of the platonic suspicion towards the poets.
But is there something to his suggesting that there's such a vast consensus in the academic and even cultural world about the greatness of Shakespeare that a number of people just very complacently say that he's great, but they, as he says, don't understand or perhaps are praising him for the wrong reasons.
Do you think that we need that at least Wittgenstein could represent a call to a more reflective confrontation with these problems that you've been signaling?
Yeah, well, I mean, one of the things my books are about is how skewed our whole sense of that era is because we read everything through Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is terrific. There's no question about that, but he isn't the only thing that's there.
And there are reasons why he's good. And often the reasons that we find him exciting are not the reasons that they found him exciting.
I think that Shakespeare is part of a large culture. He's not the only thing there.
And I think if it were possible to pay the same kind of attention to Ben Johnson or Fletcher or Marston or Ford or Shirley, you'd get a much better sense of Shakespeare.
Well, I certainly have often wondered how he became so rich that he could buy the biggest house when he went back home to Stratford.
And there must have been a great, a popular appeal about his plays that created the sort of success unless I don't understand the economics of the period.
Well, I think you don't understand the economics of theater. I mean, he was a successful theatrical entrepreneur.
He didn't make money out of his plays. He made money out of the theatrical company in which he was a part owner and shareholder.
The theatrical company made money because his plays were good and popular, but there were lots of other popular, good and popular plays that they were doing.
But in which were much more popular than his that we think are terrible now.
But is there not a case to be made that there's such a high level of presumption in his plays regarding the level of understanding of the audience that would have?
The complexity of his language, the subtlety of his characters, and sometimes some dizzying plot lines and so forth.
So he is presuming a great deal. And apparently he wasn't presuming too much. One has to assume that.
No, no, certainly. I mean, the plays are tremendously popular. Of course, we don't really know what the relationship is between the written texts that we have and what got performed on stage.
The few examples we have of prompt books show really tremendous cutting.
And one of the things, there's a prompt book of McBeth, an early prompt book of McBeth from the 1620s.
And the big thing that's cut out is most of a complicated poetry.
I mean, you have to remember that these plays took two hours on Shakespeare's stage. You can't get through King Lear in two hours.
But nevertheless, your point is absolutely right. I mean, this is really some of the most complex poetry in English.
And he's certainly assuming that his audience can handle it.
Well, good. Stephen, we agree that we want to focus on one of the plays in order, if not to prove Wittgenstein wrong, that you have to understand the whole in order to admire him.
But just look at one play and appreciate the complexities from different points of view.
But we chose King Lear because you've written about it. You're very interested in the history and the revisions of the play as has come down through the centuries.
Can you put the play in a bit of a historical perspective before we actually turn to some kind of textual analysis?
Yeah. It's written early in the reign of King James. King James succeeds.
Queen Elizabeth, King James the King of Scotland succeeds. Queen Elizabeth in 1603.
And this play is written in 1656.
We know very little about its early reception. In fact, there's hardly any reference to it.
But what we do know is that it was performed at court almost immediately.
So there was something about this play, about a king who is overthrown basically by his children, by his heirs,
that King James wanted to see. So that's an interesting point.
The other interesting thing about it historically is that it's a story that would have been very well known because it is part of British history.
It appears in the Chronicles and King Lear.
I mean, he's a legendary figure for us, but he is there on the Chronicles and he is the ancestor of Queen Elizabeth and King James.
So he's got to be there in the chronology and in the histories, Cordelia wins the final battle and King Lear gets his throne back.
But it's not a tragedy, or it's a tragedy, but it ends happily. Shakespeare changed that ending.
And for us, since we don't know the history, that doesn't mean anything, but it would have been very startling for Shakespeare's audience.
And when it gets revised in the restoration, one of the main things that the reviser, the poet named Tate does, is change the ending back to the original ending.
And that was the way in which it was played until well into the 19th century.
And you've argued that if you look at the plot line would seem to suggest that it should end happily the way it was revised by Tate, because it doesn't make sense the way Shakespeare seems to have left everything unbounded together.
And first question, what does Tate do? His version of the ending is the return, the successful return of Cordelia.
Yeah, I mean, he does a number of other things that complicated.
I mean, basically, it's Shakespeare's book. What Tate does is have Cordelia come back.
And I mean, what happens in Shakespeare also happens in Tate, that is, there's a bad moment when it looks as if Edmund is going to succeed, but he doesn't.
And there's at the last minute the Cordelia's forces, all the Albany joins with Cordelia and Cordelia's forces are successful, their retrieves his throne.
And it works as it does in the histories.
The other thing that Tate does is get rid of the King of France so that there doesn't have to be this French invasion.
And Cordelia is Cordelia and Edgar are in love.
And the reason that Cordelia behaves badly in the opening scene is to present, prevent herself from being married off to the Duke of Burgundy so that she can marry Edgar.
You don't have to deal with that, but the odd thing, the really odd thing in King Lear for me is the way everything does seem set up to work out right.
That is, the villains take care of each other, right? The two evil sisters poison each other.
Edmund loses in the fight and is killed by the good guy Edgar.
Kent comes back. You all set for everything to work out and then, suddenly, nothing works out.
Well, the bottom falls out completely.
Albany forgets that Lear and Cordelia aren't there. Kent returns and he has to remind me, he says, "Where's Lear?"
Isn't he here? And Albany says, "A great thing of us forgot."
Don't you find it curious that Shakespeare very deliberately does not give us any respite at the end or doesn't give us any consolation?
It's the most... I don't think it's over reading to say it's a very unredeemed ending without very much you can pin any hopes on.
Absolutely, absolutely the bleakest and really most nihilistic kind of ending.
It's similar to Coriolanus, the time of Athens, but this is a...
The modern reverence for Shakespeare really can't handle this. It has to claim that there is some Christian implication or something like that, but it really simply isn't true.
He defeats all your expectations.
I agree with you that the attempt to turn Cordelia into a Christ figure and find some redemption in her death and suffering, and Lear.
It's true that the villains don't win out. It would be perhaps the only thing that could have been bleak or is if Edmond were to triumph.
I love that line when the messenger comes in and says, "My Lord, Edmond is dead."
I think it's Albany who says, "That is what a trifle is."
That's quite a trifle here.
It's not even important that he's alive or dead, no?
It's such a tease in a way that even at the end having Lear carry in the body of Cordelia and think that she might still be alive.
If this feather stirs, she lives and even that isn't.
Since we're talking about the end and the unredeemed bleakness of it, maybe I can ask you a question that's always intrigued me about the very last lines of Lear.
It's not so much the never, never, never, never. That's quite chilling when he repeats the word "never" five times.
I'm curious about the, I'm looking here at Act 5, seeing three word Lear says,
"Albany is that thing that's but a trifle here."
He goes on to say, "All friends shall taste the wages of their virtue and all foes, the cup of their deserveings."
As if trying to moralize that everything is kind of worked out. And then Lear says, "And my poor fool is hanged."
And I remember a professor of mine of Shakespeare saying that that is the most powerful and in all of literature.
And my poor fool is hanged. He's not allowing the audience to buy into this kind of false consolation that Albany seems to be offering at that moment.
No, no, no, life. Why should a dog a horse a rat have life and thou know breath at all? Thou come no more, never, never, never, never.
Here's the line, "Pray you undo this button."
And there's a moment earlier in the play where he also asks someone to undo his button.
And I think that it is, let me see where it is.
It's all few endings, is it? Yes. It's out on the heath. It's an external. Exactly.
And so there's this metaphor if you want to call it a metaphor of divestment.
And here literally the investment that he's wearing to undo the button, the play is very much about a king trying to divest himself of his kingdom by dividing his property along the daughters.
There's also his insistence after he's divested himself of his lands to maintain the vestments of monarchy.
And Reagan and Goner will say, "Why do you have to have a hundred retain what need one?"
And he says, "Oh, reason not the need." There's a symbolic need to be dressed according to.
Do you find that this theme of divestment is something that runs throughout and that Shakespeare, we could reasonably hypothesize that Shakespeare is as the author in control of the metaphoric of this motif of divestment?
Yeah, it's double-edged though because that speech about reason not the need are basised beggars or in the smallest things superfluous.
If you ask what you need to keep you warm, you don't need furs and velvets and so forth.
But it's all in terms of furs and velvets.
He can't divest the rhetoric of that.
It's the hardest thing to do.
When he and Cordelia are taken off to prison, he has that beautiful little speech that heartbreaking little fantasy about will sing like birds in the cage, will be God's spies and so forth.
But it's the birds in the gilded cage. It's still some kind of something beautiful, something comforting, something where at least they have each other.
And the final divestiture is Cordelia, which of course, as you say, is completely unnecessary.
And then there are all these images of the naked man, or Ed Gurn so forth, and just leer in the storm and so forth.
Poor naked wretches, exactly.
And his realization at a certain point that maybe he has not cared enough for those naked wretches in his kingdom, and people have tried to moralize that there is some kind of insight there.
There's a turning point where he brings Edgar in out of the storm.
But Stephen, I'm intrigued when you agree with you, when you say that Edmond is probably the most fascinating character in the play.
But before we speak about Edmond, do you find leer at all a sympathetic character?
A sympathetic in the sense that Ken won easily suffer along with him in compassionate terms, or is there something about him that, well, let me speak for myself, there's something about him that I just can't warm up to, and all of his, all the suffering it goes through.
I can have compassion for it insofar as he's a fellow human being, but not insofar as he is this individual or character named leer who doesn't quite elicit strong identification for me as a reader.
I think this is a place where applying some historical perspective helps.
I do think that 17th century audience would have felt differently about this.
In the early, the way he's referred, I mean, we refer to him basically as senile, irascible, selfish, self-centered, and so forth.
Yeah, the adjective that supplied to him in the play most often is kind, the kind old man who gave his daughters all, when Richard Burbridge, who was the star of Shakespeare's company, who played leer, when he died, there was an elegy for him.
Which listed the parts that he'd played, Hamlet, Romeo, O'Fello, and so forth, and they each have their adjectives, and I'm not going to be able to remember them now, but it was the grieve at Moore and kind leer.
The... the... the... I mean, if you look at the play, I mean, the only people who consider that leer's irascibility, irash, andality, render him unfit to rule are the villains, can't tries to talk him out of giving up the kingdom and, and, and, you know, the good guys wanting back on the throne.
I mean, I think, I mean, the point is, a bad king is still a king. If you, if you believe in a monarchical system, especially if you believe in the divine right of kings, which King James certainly did, to know whether Shakespeare did, but the play, you know, maybe that's a reason why King James wanted, wanted to see this play, because it insists that the bad king is still a king.
Could we infer that from this play and others that Shakespeare was finally a monarchist of sorts, that he believed in the monarchy, if not in the divine right of monarchy, that the king is still the king, whether he's competent king or not?
Yeah, I mean, it was in his interest to believe that because he's patronly the king believed it, and he certainly believed it when he was writing the winter's tale in, in 1610, which is all about preserving this really bad king, whose, whose bad is as King Lear.
He certainly believed it then, it's much harder to see that he believed it when he was writing Richard II or Henry IV.
That epithet about the kind Lear, when I go over the play, the moments of kindness that I remember above all, and perhaps the only ones are in his relationship to the fool.
He has their genuine affection and love, and he has a forgiveness or tolerance. He allows the fool really to make a fool of him, and that's why that line and my poor fool is hanged, probably refers to Cordelia, but Cordelia and the fool seem, he has the same sort of love for his fool.
He does seem very kind, or his capacity for kindness comes through in the character of the fool.
Now, you have written into things that I've read of yours, that if one had to edit the play for our own contemporary tastes, now, if you had to edit it out to shorten it, we couldn't imagine taking it much out, except perhaps the fool.
I'm not sure I agree with that, because I think the fool plays a huge role in terms of adding this kind of crazy, dizzying arbitrariness, which reflects a state of mind that Lear has, and his verbal puns and the sheer poetry is so on the edge that I think we would lose a lot if we were to take the fool out of the equation.
Yeah, I didn't, that is what I said. What I said is that the fool is what we can't handle, because the lines are just incomprehensible.
If you look at editions of the fool's speeches, they're just more glosses there than anything.
In Shakespeare's own time, the fool's, the role of the fool would have been largely improvised by the comedian of the company, a man named Robert Arman.
If you were going to do it properly now, no, I agree with you, the fool is terribly important.
Hate cuts the fool out. He works, the fool works if he works at all in modern productions because of body language, because of, you know, acrobatic jokes and so forth.
The lines are very difficult to put across. If you wanted to do a really Shakespearean version, what you would do is take the best comedian you know, somebody like, you know, Groucho Marx or Zero Mostel, and just put him in the play, say, right, say anything that goes to mind.
And that would give you the quail. And in fact, that would be good because it would be completely unexpected, you know.
Is there a deeper connection between the fool and Cordelia? I think I remember you writing that there's no evidence that they were necessarily played by the same actor.
No, they wouldn't have been played by the same actor, but they wouldn't have to be played by the same actor for the connection to be there.
I mean, it, you know, the fool disappears and Cordelia comes back, but I mean, they're the two figures who speak truth to him always, you know.
I'm very bothered by the way the fool just drops out and we never know if he's alive or dead.
You never hear any more about him.
Right.
Well, can we talk a little bit about evil, Stephen, because the play does have its moments of dramatic evil and when Tate re-revised the play, he revised the ending as Johnson said, it was just too unbearable in ending and he approved of Tate, you know, the revision.
And you remark rightly that, I mean, if there's one thing that is really truly horrifying in the play more than the end, it's the blinding of Gloucester and that Tate did not touch that scene and you point to this comment that Johnson makes that, let's remember that Shakespeare knew his audience well when he wrote that scene.
And if I miss stating you, then correct me by all means, but I seem to gather that you are suggesting that there's something in the audience, not only of Shakespeare's time, but even we ourselves that demand this act of cruelty because it has a certain effect of gratification and that it's the reason that scene of the blinding is there is because we want it there.
How complicit does it make us the audience with the cruelty that's under representation?
Yeah.
That's the right question.
I mean, Johnson's remark is very profound.
He says, Shakespeare well knew the audience for which he wrote and knew what would please them.
And the only thing that's wrong with it is that it suggests that Shakespeare's age was barbaric, but we're not.
But that scene was still being played.
It only gets removed off stage in the 19th century.
So, I mean, one of the things we like about theater is that sadism, that you know, actually we still like with action movies.
We love that.
But you also mentioned that in real so-called real life, the probably the same people who went to see those plays used to go see real execution.
That was a cool species of highly moral entertainment.
And you could say that this is the same kind of highly moral entertainment in that it reveals how genuinely bad the evil characters are.
But the thing is, you know, how bad are gone or all in Regan?
Well, they're just as bad as we are. They're doing it to please us.
You could, of course, say the difference that the way that the play unmasks our bad faith with regard to these spectacles is that when they would go see these horrible tortures of criminals, they would have this kind of righteous sense that it's the bad guy who's getting punished.
Whereas here it's the good guy getting punished by the bad guys.
And so there might be a kind of unmasking of our bad faith in that regard.
Yeah. Yeah.
I just want to mention that line that Cornwall, when he, after blinding a glasser, there's a servant who just has this reaction of the more unacceptable of the act.
And he actually draws a sword on his own master and he wounds him.
And I've talked about this in the Machiavelli show I did a few weeks ago that there's this line that Cornwall says to the poor.
Cornwall says to Regan, it says, "I bleed a pace Regan untimely comes this hurt."
Untimely comes this hurt.
And this idea that the villain can get everything right, but you just will never get the timing right and that something about circumstance will always find a way to win out over the most perfectly strategized intentions that the...
And the worst part of it is that it's a servant who's done it.
Well, it's the worst part and also the best part because later in the play he's exalted as being our moral conscience.
But of course, at the same time, we're being gratified, but the servant has to come to mask our own innate cruelty about it.
Now, Edmond, if we can talk about Edmond a little bit, the character of Edmond is, as you said, he's quite fascinating.
And I don't want to insist too much on the German philosophers, but there is a quote that I'd like to read from Hegel.
And it doesn't apply directly to Edmond alone, but it does apply to many of the characters in the villains as such.
And in his typically, you know, dramatic, portentious prose, Hegel writes,
"The more Shakespeare on the infinite embrace of his world stage proceeds to develop, the extreme limits of evil and folly,
to that extent he concentrates these characters in their limitations."
While doing so, however, he confers on them intelligence and imagination.
And by means of the image in which they, by virtue of that intelligence, contemplate themselves objectively as a work of art,
he makes them free artists of themselves and is fully able through the complete virility and truth of his characterization
to awaken our interest in criminals, no less than in the most vulgar and weak-witted lovers and fools.
Would you agree that there is a very least emotional, if not intellectual, intelligence in the villains that renders them at least interesting if not attractive to us in the universe?
Oh, yeah, though. I don't know why you're being so cautious.
Well, you know, women used to fall in love with Edmund Keyn's Richard III.
But Edmund, I've seen productions in which Edmund was played as, you know, just a glamorous hunk.
And there's something right about that. The great deal of the energy of the play is in that figure.
He's also, he's genuinely subversive in the way the other villains in the play aren't.
I mean, I got a garmeral and we can just standard villains.
But Edmund, when Edmund invokes nature and makes nature his goddess,
that's overturning all the claims in the play about how nature is orderly and good.
And if we only are part of nature, we will survive and we will be virtuous and so forth.
This is Darwinian nature. This is the strongest we'll survive and the most cunning will survive.
Or the most erectile.
Absolutely.
Nature stand up now for bastards.
Stand up now for bastards and I'm making love to this sister and I'm making love to that sister.
And in Tate's version, what he sets out to do is rape Cordelia.
So it's, yeah, I mean, the sexual energy is where a lot of attractiveness is located there.
Well, I would have two questions for you then about Edmund.
First is, is there a way we could say that he becomes the forerunner or the modern era subsequent to Shakespeare is more Ed Mundian than anything else.
In so far as Edmund represents and expresses an ideology of self-making or as Hegel says that he makes them free artists of themselves.
So Edmund is someone and you've written about this, he was not only a bastard and therefore disinherited, but even if he were legitimate, he would have been disinherited because of the law of primal gender.
And therefore, he is questioning the so-called natural law, which means positive law of a society which can give everything to the firstborn and leave the others impoverished.
And that there's something arbitrary and for a subsequent sensibility unjust about that.
And he also is someone who is very eloquent when he expresses his disdain for all the excuses that others make about providence and the stars.
So that famous soliloquy in early in the play where he says this is the excellent faupery of the world that when we are sick and fortunate, we make guilty of our disasters, the sun, the moon and stars as if we were villains on necessity.
And that's why we're all in the world.
And so we're all in the world.
We're the fan of Tate's-- of Tate's King Lear.
Do you think-- again, these are speculative questions that
are ultimately impossible to answer.
But do you feel with your intimate hands-on knowledge
of Shakespeare that he himself subscribed to an kind of
ideology where by human beings are ultimately
the agents of their own catastrophes and disasters
and tragedies, or is he just too difficult to pinpoint on such
a thorny issue?
Well, it depends on the play.
But it's a question of more or less rather than yes or no.
But I would say that the existential force is pretty strong
throughout the way we make our own choices.
The interesting question in various plays is, well, what
if he hadn't chosen that?
What was the alternative?
I mean, that's what makes plays like Corylaine
is complicated, you know?
Well, do you believe that there's a moment of true
compunction on Edgar's part at the end when he says there's
still time that I can do some good--
Oh, Edmonds.
--admonds, yes, I'm sorry.
Well, he's the last possible moment, isn't it?
And he's also been--
he has lost.
That is, there's nothing to be gained in--
nothing except pure bad nature to be gained in allowing
Cordelia and Lear to be killed at that point.
But it's--
I mean, it comes so late in the play that you--
Untimely comes this story.
That's right, yeah.
Exactly, yeah.
And this-- going back to this existentialist theme,
there's the famous lines, I think, of Glowsters
that are about we as--
As flies to want and both.
As flies to want and all of us are we to kill us for their sport.
It kills.
So who is it?
John, the King Lear and the Gods by Elton--
Yeah, William Elton.
William Elton wrote this book in which he claims that there's
no evidence that there are any gods in King Lear.
In fact, the fifth act, which no one ever wants to read,
strips away any possible point that previous French would
call it kind of foothold for the notion that there are gods.
Does it sound to you when Gousters saying that it's again
special pleading that he wants to blame,
that are there gods in this--
if not in Shakespeare's own kind of authorship world,
corpus as a whole, in this play, are there--
it's there any suggestion that there are gods
or are we in a world where the gods or God has abandoned us
to our own devices?
It certainly looks like it, doesn't it?
I mean, when Lear says to Cordelia, at the end,
will be like birds in a cage and will be God's spies,
why does God need spies unless he's abandoned us?
It's hard to see that anybody's in charge.
It's hard to see that Edmund isn't right.
Steven, this is--
I mean, I shipped the register here with a question that
is actually more personalized pose.
But with all this notion of the elusive author of these plays,
I, when I read Shakespeare, at least a lot of Shakespeare,
I have a sense that I actually love the person
who wrote these plays.
I have a strong sense of the author as someone
that I not only admire, but I feel
that he had such a sensitivity to the human
that I feel like this is a human being.
I could really hang out with profitably
and develop a real friendship and affection for.
Do you have a sense of the person behind the creation?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, I'd love to have dinner with him.
He's interested in everything.
He's obviously a good listener.
I wouldn't want to have dinner with Ban Johnson.
He'd just pontificate him.
Do you find that the sonnets are the voice of the person
who authored these plays?
Or is it just one more mask of Shakespeare playing
the lyric lover or the--
Wow, yes, well.
That's a big question.
I mean, there's some way in which the sonnets must be autobiographical.
But what that way is very difficult to say.
And trying to read them, trying to read them against the plays
and come up with the real Shakespeare, I don't think works.
I don't think you can.
They're not just another mask because they're so deeply felt.
But trying to extract a life from that is another question.
Yeah, I'm not so interested in extracting a life as much as I'm
struck by the theme of the everyday tragedy of growing old
that you get throughout those sonnets.
And that time of year, that'll may as soon be old and not--
the idea that here's someone who, if he is speaking from a core
of selfhood and those sonnets seems to have this typical poets
lament for just the fact of the passage of time.
There's things that get lost and they're not going to be retrieved.
And there's, you know, winter comes on.
And it's just the law of nature.
But we bear a witness to it, but we do so with a certain kind of
sorrow or nostalgia or something.
Yes.
But the other theme that goes along with that is that, you know,
poetry can do something to preserve us from the passage of time.
And that's what's so striking about it.
There are these often megalomaniac claims about what poetry can do.
And then in the next sonnet, it'll say, but it's not true.
You have to have children.
You have to do something else.
It's-- I mean, the sonnets are a monument to failure, really.
Yeah.
And this idea that poetry can somehow save us from the oblivion
that time leads all things into-- that would be nice.
But I always have in my mind the two kind of almost gratuitous
appearance of poets in the play of Julius Caesar.
And one is when this poet, you know, he leaves us house.
Sinner, he has absolutely no idea what's going on.
He's out-- he's disconnected from history,
going out for a night stroll.
And he's surrounded.
And then he ends up getting lynched because he's punning on, you know.
Because there's sinner that considers--
Sinner.
No, no, sinner that poet.
And it's a terrarium for his bed.
Terrors for his bed versus.
And later in the play, when Cassius and Brutus
are involved in a very heated argument, and then this poet says,
oh, let me in.
I have to go in and bring about these two people.
And he makes this kind of little jingle rhyme.
And Brutus just says, how vile he doth this cynic rhyme.
And Cassius says, you should humor him.
Brutus, this is his humor.
And he says, I'll know his humor when he knows his time.
What should the wars do with these jigging fools?
Outpents, out.
And the poet disappears.
I can't help but think that Shakespeare did not
think that poetry was going to be of much help in saving us
from the history's disaster, no?
Fair enough.
You might give us some temporary mortality.
But yeah.
Well, I think we've come to the end of our--
Stephen, thank you very much for joining us on entitled opinions.
I want to remind our listeners who've been speaking with Professor
Stephen Orgle from the English Department here at Stanford,
our program today.
And all the previous programs of entitled opinions
can be accessed through our web page.
Just log on to the web page of the Department of French
and Italian, click on entitled opinions.
Or go to iTunes and find our podcast on the iTunes
Music Store and listen to the shows there as well.
So thanks again, Stephen.
We'll have you on another time.
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