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‘High-Engender'd Battles’: Gender and Power in ‘Queen Lear’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
Abstract
As a companion piece to the foregoing study of Ophelia and /, Hamlet, there follows a full appraisal of a project discussed in the previous issue (NTQ53) as part of our feature on the Open University/BBC experiments in ‘multimedia Shakespeare’. For King Lear: Text and Performance – one of the pilot CD-ROMS which were the end-products of the experiment – three teams of performers were commissioned, in collaboration with the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, to create over a two-day period their own variations on the Heath Scene in Lear. The most innovative of these, in Teresa Dobson's judgement, was conceived and directed by the Canadian performance artist and writer Beau Coleman, who envisioned a female Lear – a woman who, having found success in a male-dominated world, comes to confront the nature of that power in the process of relinquishing it. Teresa Dobson, who teaches in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta, witnessed and here records the development of the project, also assessing how far it succeeded in its intention to ‘raise questions about the gender and power relations in King Lear, as well as questions about what happens when Lear himself is cast against gender’.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998
References
Notes and References
1. See Goodman, Lizbeth et al. , ‘The Multimedia Bard: Plugged and Unplugged’, New Theatre Quarterly, XIV, No. 53 (1998)Google Scholar.
2. The King Lear Pilot CD-ROM is one component of an undergraduate Shakespeare course currently being developed by the Open University BBC Shakespeare Multimedia Research Group. The CD-ROM includes, among other things, a number of performances of the Heath Scene.
3. Beau Coleman is Associate Professor of Drama, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, and best known in Canada as a performance artist and visual theatre maker. For an analysis of her work, see Goodman, Lizbeth, ‘Who's Looking at Who: Reviewing Medusa’, Modern Drama, Spring 1996Google Scholar.
4. The Open University/BBC kindly gave me access to all video diarist footage to facilitate the writing of this paper. All allusions to pre- or post-production discussions and interviews are made with reference to this footage.
5. Lisa Jardine, fom an unpublished interview with the OU/BBC conducted at RADA, Spring 1996.
6. This effect was photographed by the BBC and student video diarist Janet Man after the production. With text projected onto her body, Queen Lear seems diminished, entrapped. It is significant that the foremost passage projected is the interchange between Lear and Cordelia in the first act – one which so clearly depicts the silencing of woman. Lear asks his daughter to speak, yet he will listen to her only if she speaks his language:
LEAR: … what can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sisters'? Speak.
CORDELIA: Nothing, my lord.
LEAR: Nothing?
CORDELIA: Nothing.
LEAR: Nothing comes from nothing, speak again.
(I, i, 85–91)
Queen Lear functions only within and from behind the discourse of man; indeed, this is true of the production even when the written text is not projected. In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Hélene Cixous speaks of the necessity for women to disencumber themselves from the language of men and their grammar if they truly wish to be heard in their own right. I shall return to this notion later.
7. See Belsey, Catherine, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Routledge, 1985)Google Scholar. Belsey distinguishes between the T of utterance and the uttering T, ‘between the subject which speaks and the subject which is only represented – symbolized – in the symbolic order’ (p. 221). Queen Lear speaks, but she does not ‘threaten the system of differences which gives meaning to patriarchy’ (p. 191). In other words, she stands only at the margins of discourse.
8. Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, XVI, No. 3 (1975), p. 6–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9. See De Lauretis, Teresa, Alice Doesn't (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for further discussion of the gaze.
10. In ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, op. cit., Mulvey also discusses the cinematic phenomenon whereby woman's body is ‘stylized and fragmented by close-ups’, resulting in further objectification. In this paper, my focus is necessarily limited to the theatrical performance of Queen Lear. I should like to note, however, that the master cut of this performance, produced by Tony Coe for the purpose of the CD-ROM, is marked by such fragmentation: consequently, the video version of this scene objectifies Lear more than did the original stage production. On CD-ROM, this effect is intensified: the picture is smaller, darker, choppier, and Lear appears doll-like. Thus, what strength Lear does possess on stage is gradually drained away through the progressive processing of her image.
11. Teresa De Lauretis, op. cit.
12. Lines such as ‘Nothing comes from nothing’ (I, i) and ‘Never, never, never, never, never’ (V, ii) are among the voice samplings. Such allusions reinforce the female Lear's objectification in their suggestion of emptiness and hopelessness.
13. Luce Irigaray, ‘This Sex Which is Not One’, reprinted in Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds., Feminisms (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 350–6.
14. Hélene Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, reprinted in Warhol and Herndl, eds., op. cit., p. 334–49. Here Cixous suggests that insinuating women into male discourse is not giving woman voice. Women must instead find their own, feminine, mode of discourse if they wish to break out of the silence in which they have been entrapped for centuries. She writes: ‘It is by writing, from and toward women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence. Women should break out of the snare of silence. They shouldn't be conned into accepting a domain which is the margin or the harem.’