//literary and arts//
Spring 2019
Spring 2019
Queen Lear:
Glenda Jackson as Shakespeare's Famous King
Ruthie Gottesman
King Lear sinks to the floor of the stage as the hiss of the trembling gold wall behind him threatens to envelop him entirely. He points with a frail hand to the man crumpled beside him on the floor and, with wide eyes that I can see all the way from the balcony, proclaims: “Is man… no more than this?” Before the words even have even left his mouth, my grandfather taps my arm. “This is it, Ruthie,” he mutters. “This is it.” Though he has been an articulate man all his life, these are the only words my grandfather can muster to describe this scene, which shows how senseless and beautiful life really is.
The famed actress and politician Glenda Jackson takes the titular role in this new Broadway production of King Lear. Lear is known to be the Mount Everest of roles, since it requires an older actor to meet the physical and emotional demands of the character. To play Lear is usually seen as the culmination of a male actor’s career. In recent years, it’s been tackled by big names, including Michael Gambon, Corin Redgrave, and Ian McKellen.
Jackson is the first female Lear to take the reins on Broadway. Standing in the shadows of these towering masculine figures, Jackson has created a Lear that has never been seen before. Though the play doesn’t explicitly address this gender-switch, she brings to the role subtle, but meaningful changes. This Lear’s voice bellows from within, yet has a deep tenderness. He is dignified with minimal motion; somehow larger than life at just five-foot-six. Jackson draws us in the moment she first strolls on stage, living up to the countless raving reviews her performance has generated.
This isn’t the first instance of gender-bending in the history of this play. In its earliest performances, during Shakespeare’s lifetime, prepubescent boys would have been cast in the female roles. We considered this phenomenon in my Literature Humanities course while reading King Lear. The books on the syllabus were mainly written by male authors, and have been criticized for lacking women’s perspectives. This is due, in part, to the dearth of female authors in Western literature, a result of women not being encouraged to pursue writing and publishing. As a result of this history, it’s difficult to gauge how women lived and what opinions they’ve held about their male-dominated world. Shakespeare’s plays reflect this gap based on their titles alone--Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth. King Lear is no exception to this pattern. Lear cries, in a fit of rage, that though women seem pure, “Down from the waist… is all the fiends’. There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulfurous pit—burning, scalding, stench, consumption!” His world is in shambles and Lear decides to blame it on the female sex organ.
Despite the explicit and vivid misogyny that this central character expresses, Shakespeare created strong female characters who defy these generalizations. Lear’s daughter, Cordelia, asserts her value as an individual when she refuses to flatter him with empty promises of devotion. Even so, it’s unlikely that the young boy cast to play this defiant woman in Shakespeare’s London would have been able to do her character justice.
As I witnessed Jackson perform Lear’s descent into madness, I knew we’d come a long way from Shakespeare’s London. Jackson’s performance demonstrates that masculinity is not an essential part of Lear’s identity. She expressed in an interview that she knows firsthand that when people age, “the kinds of boundaries we are taught to believe create the different genders begin to fracture, to fray.” This is fitting for a play in which the fabric of society begins to “fray” as well. Social ties unravel; children turn on parents and kings become commoners. This play is about stripping down artificial relationships and our identities to reveal the powerful chaos that lies beneath them.
Night after night, Jackson’s Lear fights to maintain order, only to ultimately surrender courageously to an unforgiving world. Men, and especially kings, are expected to maintain control of their surroundings. Jackson sets Lear free of these bonds to follow a more wild path. Fellow actress, Ruth Wilson, remarks that Jackson “does it differently every night; it never goes stale… You have to constantly move around with a person who’s volatile, and you don’t know which way the wind is blowing with them.” Jackson is patient with the king she plays eight times a week. Through her, Lear has the liberty to react without reserve to the senseless storm around him. She doesn’t change Lear into a feminine character, but her feminine perspective allows for unique depths of his character to shine forth.
Watching a woman play Lear while sitting next to my grandfather was a moving experience. I’m the female heir to a line of male Shakespeare enthusiasts. My grandfather has been teaching Shakespeare for 13 years through a continuing education program at Stony Brook University. Though he spent his career as a computer science professor, he’s always studied Shakespeare in his free time. His father was an automobile dealer who never made it past the ninth grade and he never seemed to share my grandfather’s intellectual pursuits. However, years after he passed away, my grandfather found a notebook of his with meticulous notes on all the scholarly works that he had been struggling with, including Shakespeare’s works. Upon this discovery, my grandfather was deeply moved. They had shared this passion, but never got the chance to talk about it.
Because of my grandfather’s missed opportunity to share his love of Shakespeare with his father, it means all the more to him to watch Lear’s discovery of the vulnerable and wild state of (wo)man with me by his side. And it means so much to me to be with him as Jackson invites me into my family tradition with frail, but powerful, waving hands. She shows me that there is room for a woman at the center of a play that was possibly Shakespeare’s greatest. She portrays the pains of growing old and the incredible capacity to still learn late in life. Her female perspective enriches the Bard’s words, showing newfound depth in his most memorable character.
At the end of the show, my grandfather pulls the creased cover of last week’s New York Times Magazine with careful hands from the pocket of his khakis. Jackson’s Lear graces the cover. He traces the curve of her neck, the arch of her hand. Her tortured, yet ecstatic face expresses in one snapshot the full range of what it means to be human. “Glenda is so lean, and I don’t just mean that physically,” fellow actress Elizabeth Marvel strives to explain. “I mean that emotionally, intellectually. All the fat is burned off, and you just have this brilliant diamond core.”
“I’d like to sculpt her” my grandfather sighs.
I grin. “She’s the perfect subject.”
The famed actress and politician Glenda Jackson takes the titular role in this new Broadway production of King Lear. Lear is known to be the Mount Everest of roles, since it requires an older actor to meet the physical and emotional demands of the character. To play Lear is usually seen as the culmination of a male actor’s career. In recent years, it’s been tackled by big names, including Michael Gambon, Corin Redgrave, and Ian McKellen.
Jackson is the first female Lear to take the reins on Broadway. Standing in the shadows of these towering masculine figures, Jackson has created a Lear that has never been seen before. Though the play doesn’t explicitly address this gender-switch, she brings to the role subtle, but meaningful changes. This Lear’s voice bellows from within, yet has a deep tenderness. He is dignified with minimal motion; somehow larger than life at just five-foot-six. Jackson draws us in the moment she first strolls on stage, living up to the countless raving reviews her performance has generated.
This isn’t the first instance of gender-bending in the history of this play. In its earliest performances, during Shakespeare’s lifetime, prepubescent boys would have been cast in the female roles. We considered this phenomenon in my Literature Humanities course while reading King Lear. The books on the syllabus were mainly written by male authors, and have been criticized for lacking women’s perspectives. This is due, in part, to the dearth of female authors in Western literature, a result of women not being encouraged to pursue writing and publishing. As a result of this history, it’s difficult to gauge how women lived and what opinions they’ve held about their male-dominated world. Shakespeare’s plays reflect this gap based on their titles alone--Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth. King Lear is no exception to this pattern. Lear cries, in a fit of rage, that though women seem pure, “Down from the waist… is all the fiends’. There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulfurous pit—burning, scalding, stench, consumption!” His world is in shambles and Lear decides to blame it on the female sex organ.
Despite the explicit and vivid misogyny that this central character expresses, Shakespeare created strong female characters who defy these generalizations. Lear’s daughter, Cordelia, asserts her value as an individual when she refuses to flatter him with empty promises of devotion. Even so, it’s unlikely that the young boy cast to play this defiant woman in Shakespeare’s London would have been able to do her character justice.
As I witnessed Jackson perform Lear’s descent into madness, I knew we’d come a long way from Shakespeare’s London. Jackson’s performance demonstrates that masculinity is not an essential part of Lear’s identity. She expressed in an interview that she knows firsthand that when people age, “the kinds of boundaries we are taught to believe create the different genders begin to fracture, to fray.” This is fitting for a play in which the fabric of society begins to “fray” as well. Social ties unravel; children turn on parents and kings become commoners. This play is about stripping down artificial relationships and our identities to reveal the powerful chaos that lies beneath them.
Night after night, Jackson’s Lear fights to maintain order, only to ultimately surrender courageously to an unforgiving world. Men, and especially kings, are expected to maintain control of their surroundings. Jackson sets Lear free of these bonds to follow a more wild path. Fellow actress, Ruth Wilson, remarks that Jackson “does it differently every night; it never goes stale… You have to constantly move around with a person who’s volatile, and you don’t know which way the wind is blowing with them.” Jackson is patient with the king she plays eight times a week. Through her, Lear has the liberty to react without reserve to the senseless storm around him. She doesn’t change Lear into a feminine character, but her feminine perspective allows for unique depths of his character to shine forth.
Watching a woman play Lear while sitting next to my grandfather was a moving experience. I’m the female heir to a line of male Shakespeare enthusiasts. My grandfather has been teaching Shakespeare for 13 years through a continuing education program at Stony Brook University. Though he spent his career as a computer science professor, he’s always studied Shakespeare in his free time. His father was an automobile dealer who never made it past the ninth grade and he never seemed to share my grandfather’s intellectual pursuits. However, years after he passed away, my grandfather found a notebook of his with meticulous notes on all the scholarly works that he had been struggling with, including Shakespeare’s works. Upon this discovery, my grandfather was deeply moved. They had shared this passion, but never got the chance to talk about it.
Because of my grandfather’s missed opportunity to share his love of Shakespeare with his father, it means all the more to him to watch Lear’s discovery of the vulnerable and wild state of (wo)man with me by his side. And it means so much to me to be with him as Jackson invites me into my family tradition with frail, but powerful, waving hands. She shows me that there is room for a woman at the center of a play that was possibly Shakespeare’s greatest. She portrays the pains of growing old and the incredible capacity to still learn late in life. Her female perspective enriches the Bard’s words, showing newfound depth in his most memorable character.
At the end of the show, my grandfather pulls the creased cover of last week’s New York Times Magazine with careful hands from the pocket of his khakis. Jackson’s Lear graces the cover. He traces the curve of her neck, the arch of her hand. Her tortured, yet ecstatic face expresses in one snapshot the full range of what it means to be human. “Glenda is so lean, and I don’t just mean that physically,” fellow actress Elizabeth Marvel strives to explain. “I mean that emotionally, intellectually. All the fat is burned off, and you just have this brilliant diamond core.”
“I’d like to sculpt her” my grandfather sighs.
I grin. “She’s the perfect subject.”
//RUTHIE GOTTESMAN is a junior in Columbia College and Creative Editor of The Current. She can be reached at rag2188@columbia.edu.
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.