This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on even as he himself neglects it. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of passion are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. The contemptible machines by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo’s terrible figures. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me.īut the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. So to see Lear acted-to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting.
He writes during a time of popular consensus that Shakespeare was best enjoyed on the page instead of the stage, showing how different the interaction with Shakespeare’s works was at the time. Mary could not put her name on the book not only because she was a woman, but because she was in and out of mental institutions for stabbing her mother to death with a kitchen knife (although when you read her actual story of what led her to that, it’s difficult not to sympathize a bit check out Mary Lamb at Wikipedia for the short version of her story).Īnyway, Charles Lamb has this to say about Shakespeare’s play of King Lear. The original Tales from Shakespeare was actually not co-authored, but written by Charles’ sister, Mary Lamb, under the pseudonym Thomas Hodgkins. Charles is co-author of Tales from Shakespeare, published in 1807, a book that has never been out of publication since that time.
In the process of producing the King Lear edition, I again ran across a statement from Charles Lamb about reading Lear as opposed to seeing it performed. I have been consumed with getting the Readers’ Edition of King Lear to press in time for the next close read and also an Actors’ Edition for the cast of our September performance, thus I missed sending out this mini-newsletter for several weeks.
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