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Intertextuality in Edward Bond’s Lear
Edward Bond is an English socialist playwright of over fifty plays, most of
which portrays violence and aggression man inflicts upon one another in order to
stimulate changes in society. Having lived through the Second World War and through
his national service in the British Army, Bond has recognized the violence that has
been hidden behind the veil of man’s normal social behavior. In his intertext of King
Lear, Bond reconstructs the plot of King Lear by combining King Lear’s plot and the
Gloucester subplot, accentuating the cruelty inflicted over humanity. Also, Bond
concludes his play very differently from Shakespeare. As he disagrees with the ways
Shakespeare concludes King Lear with the downfall of the universe brought about by
human cruelty and the characters’ total resignation, Bond, here, contends for the
significance of writing for social utility in order to create a rational society rather than
m erely illustrating and m agnifying the picture of the w orld going through its
decadence as Shakespeare did. For Bond, “a rational way to achieve a rational society
includes writing plays, that means teaching, that means discussion, that means
persuading, that means caring” (Bond, 1976, p. 417). Arguing for the utilization of art
to initiate a rational society Bond calls his theatre “rational theatre”. As Daniel R.
Jones explains:
"[R]ational theatre" denies the view that man is innately aggressive;
that the present social order is the best man can do, … In place of such
pessimism, Bond offers the vision that a good society creates good
men, that the present social order is its own form of violence, and that
man can change his society.
(Jones, 1980, p. 517)
Theatre, for Bond, is the miniature that reaches out to offer solutions to the magnitude,
to the society—a level which Shakespeare did not offer his audience, because—in
Bond’s view—Shakespeare was too much in thrall to established concepts of nature
which denied the possibility of radical change . M oreover, Bond changes the
relationship of the main characters. Cordelia is not Lear’s daughter, but a daughter of a
priest whose belief in the concept of “natural” cruelty of human from which the
justification of the necessity of social institutions established to keep humanity’s peace
is identical to the society that Shakespeare ’s King Lear and Bond’s Lear have
established. The Intertextuality in Edward Bond’s rewriting of King Lear into Lear can
be considered a dem ythologization of these concepts of nature constructed by
Shakespeare’s King Lear. This has been done through Bond’s redefinition of the
concepts of social and natural structure, which intends to undermine the Elizabethan
hierarchical social structure, redefine the idea of morality and its necessity for human
beings and amplify the social criticisms implicit in Shakespeare.
The idea of hierarchical social and natural structure and the “canon”
Hierarchy: the ideal external nature of King Lear’s world
The idea of external nature in King Lear as constructed and believed by the
Elizabethans had been established as a concept of hierarchy imbued in society and
nature. The structure of hierarchy called the “Chain of Being” becomes the definitive
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structure by which the Elizabethan’s as well as the King Lear’s characters’ lives are
governed. It also acts as the pattern of ideal, law and morality to which man aspires ,
in order to be closer to God or the gods. The Chain of Being is the ladder of creation
which contains every being in heaven and on earth. All beings in the chain correspond
to one another. Thus, commotion on earth would result also in commotion in heaven
or contrariwise. The whole Chain consists of God, angels, human beings, animals,
vegetables, and minerals respectively in form of descending hierarchies. Also, within
each ladder of the Chain, there are hierarchies of such beings. In the realm of heaven,
God is in his highest place of the hierarchy followed by angels, who are closest to
God in their divinity and reason. After the angels, there are human beings who are on
top of the earthly realm, residing between the celestial and the earthly beings. Among
the earthly beings, human beings are the closest to angels. Thus, they are the most
similar to divinity and are the only being on earth that is capable of reason. However,
human beings are yet far from perfection, since they are also similar to animals—
which possess physical appetite and sensory perception yet without reasons. Then,
there are the vegetative and the mineral which are ranked on the bottom of the Chain.
These beings lack sensory perception; thus, they are without reasons. The discussion
of the whole Chain of Being, nevertheless, is beyond the scope of this article. Thus,
only the hierarchies within the human realm and some of the relationships that would
be relevant to further discussions will be discussed.
The clash of nature and civilization in the society of Lear
In Bond’s Lear, the concept of the correspondences between the social and
the natural in King Lear has constantly been questioned. While Shakespeare and the
Elizabethans posit that the natural has to be acquired through the aspiration towards
perfection—being in harmony with morality, with the virtues constituting order in
society—Bond argues for the clash between bio-sphere, the sphere serving human’s
biological needs, and techno-sphere, the sphere constituted by laws and social
morality in which man is forced to live in ways for which he is not biologically
designed. King Lear’s primitive nature can also be interpreted as a condition where
man is underdeveloped in his senses, intellect and decorum . King Lear 1, in his
madness in the wilderness, loses his sense of reality, breaking completely away from
his sense and decorum. He thinks Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, is a father deposed
by his daughters like King Lear himself: “[h]ast thou given all to thy two daughters,”
(Wells, 2001, Scene 11, 43). Edgar, adopting a disguise as Poor Tom—the basest
creature in the human Chain of Being—announces “Edgar, I nothing am ,” and
mumbles names of the fiends relinquishing his status as Gloucester’s heir and even as
a sane common man (Scene 7, 186). Both King Lear and Edgar are seen, from the
Elizabethan perspective, to be deteriorated in their statuses, sense and decorum.
Therefore, both characters have to break away from the primitiveness of nature and
enter into social order to become “natural,” to conform to the decorum and orders set
up by his society. The King has to be recovered by culture—music. And Edgar, after
For future purposes, “Lear” refers to the character in Bond’s play, and
“King Lear” to the character in Shakespeare.
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sacrificing his status to perform a virtuous son’s duty, is restored to his rank and
reconciles with Gloucester.
For Bond, by contrast, that primitive nature—the bio-sphere, the natural—
is the state man has been born to be evolved in. It is the state which man has to take
into account in order to create a society that serves his biological desires. This biosphere is in opposition w ith the society that is regulated by law, culture and
morality—what Bond calls the techno-sphere. In an interview with Karl-Heinz Stoll,
Bond announces that our problem is
[T]o create a society in which it is possible for people to function in a
way which would be natural for them. And the only sort of society
where that is possible is a society in which people have initiative for
their own lives and have to accept the responsibilities for their
actions.
(Bond, 1976, p. 416)
The society of Lear is radically different from that of the Renaissance King. The
present society in Lear is a society in which the natural is thoroughly contradicted by
the cultural. Bond argues that disorder derives from culture and society rather than
human nature or nature itself. In his play, law, order and technological advances are in
no way related to common sense. While Lear, in the first act, is on his wall inspection
trip, the Councillor oddly describes the geography of the ground on which he is
standing, asking “[i]sn’t it a swam p on this m ap? ” Fontanelle, Lear’s younger
daughter, announces to her sister, Bodice, “My feet are wet” after hearing that (p. 2).
The map—the tool developed by law and culture—does not serve to perfect human’s
commonsensical perception of their surroundings. Rather, it disharmonizes them from
their environment. The society Bond asks for requires a radical change from the
society of King Lear and of his own time and place. Instead of having to obey the
order and morality like King Lear’s society or living in the mechanical world and
being deprived of common sense, the society Bond propagandizes for is that in which
man, like animals, “will slip out of its cage [socialized morality], and lies in the fields,
and run by the river, and groom itself in the sun, and sleeps in its hole from night to
morning,” to be given complete freedom according to his biological needs (46).
Even though Bond prefers the primitive nature where man can live in the
way they have biologically evolved, he also accepts that the advent of social
institutions make it impossible for humans to turn back to their bio-sphere. Thus, he
claims that man, like his Lear, has to change the society to be a healthier place for life.
In other words, they have to be responsible for the afflictions they have given each
other and, at least, reduce them. Lear, in act three, states that he “made all the mistakes
in the world and [he] pays for each of them” (p. 89). Here, Lear, being responsible for
his actions, is Bond’s representative figure of the people in the society who initiate
changes that he propagandizes for in the interview.
For Shakespeare, to be natural is to be in harmony with law and order with
which the authority has ideologized their subjects. Bond argues that civilization, social
institutions and technology rid man of his ordinary nature, making him a violent
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creature in search of a return to harmony with his natural existence. Social morality is
the tool to “protect social institution s” by the utilization of “forces and the
manufacturer of myths … or false world views” in order to maintain an “irrational
society” (Bond, 1976, p. 417). Morality and civilization are not the ideal or perfection;
instead, they are forces serving the tyranny of the ruler. With these destructive social
institutions, like the monarchical institution of Lear which creates the moralistic false
world view that his wall will “make you [his people] free” despite the destruction it
has caused, man in society has become more violent because they attempt to be free
from the forces and the irrationality the authorities have imposed upon them.
Furthermore, Bond expands on the social criticisms which might in fact be
presented implicitly in King Lear. In many Feminist interpretations of King Lear, King
Lear is “a m an m ore sinning than sinned against” (Bloom , 1998, p. 496). H is
daughters, Gonoril and Regan, are not considered “ingrateful” but are supposedly the
daughters whose ingratitude is the product of a tyrannical father whose love contest
asks them not for love but its hypocrite demonstration. In Lear, Bond even dramatizes
the aggression of the two sisters further. Bodice and Fontanelle, Lear’s daughters who
are equivalent to King Lear’s Gonoril and Regan, are portrayed to be ruthlessly cruel
when they have their own power. Like Regan who could order Gloucester’s blinding
to prevent him from helping her father, Bodice and Fontanelle, raised according to the
rules of socialized morality created by Lear, a political despot, are capable of torturing
Warrington cruelly. A fter having cut his tongue out and having tortured him ,
Fontanelle, not being satisfied with the aggression before her, announces “[o]h, Christ,
why did I cut his tongue out? I want to hear him scream!” as if she could not get
enough of her own ruthlessness (17). Bodice could even witness the torture quite
calmly while knitting. Her knitting could be considered one of the emblems of
civilization she has learned from her society. Her mumbling “plain, purl, plain,” the
revision of the pattern of her knitting, is similar to the pattern of aggres sion that she
and her sister have imitated from their father, and she performs it against those without
power. In portraying these patterns, Bond announces through his drama that the
civilization and socialized morality are the concepts by which human beings have been
raised and governed, and they act as a wall restricting people from living according to
their biological needs. These concepts later become innate in their being, and they use
them to justify their aggression towards others who reside upon the lower ladders of
society than their own.
Correspondence between the social and the natural in King Lear and Lear’s
eradication of absolute hierarchy
The correspondence between the social and the natural in King Lear can be
seen through the correspondences between the macrocosm (heaven and the universe)
and the body politic, and between the macrocosm and the microcosm (human body).
There are many references to the concept of correspondences between the macrocosm
and the body politic in the Renaissance. John Norden, for instance, describes the
R enaissance England as “the heavens and Queen Elizabeth and her C ouncil
[corresponding to] the primum mobile or controlling sphere, within whose compass
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any other motion must be contained.” 2 As the state is equivalent to heaven, the
position of the king, the ruler of the state, is thus compared to the sun, the ruler of the
heavens, from which the commonplace le roi soleil is derived (Tillyard, p. 97). The
correspondences between heaven and earth and human body, “the idea of man
summing up the universe in himself,” is another concept evidently presented in the
drama (p. 99). “The constitution of [man’s] body duplicated the constitution of the
earth” (Tillyard, p. 431). And the “commonest of all correspondences in poetry is that
between the storms and earthquakes of the great world and the stormy passions of
man” (p. 100). Thus, the chaos caused by either the macrocosm or the body politic,
the supreme body of the microcosm, would have an impact on the commotion in the
others; as the First Gentleman describes that King Lear, in his rage, to “Strives in his
little world of man to outscorn / The to- and-fro-conflicting wind and rain.” (Scene 8,
9-10)
The concept of the Renaissance correspondences is derived from its
medieval forefather though it is not believed as rigidly. Rather, it takes on a double
function. First, it ex presses the E lizabethan ’s desire for order. S econd , the
correspondences serve as a fix ed pattern as oppose d to the m utability a nd
imperfections of humanity’s real life. Thus, though there are orders and restraint as the
absolute entity to which humans must aspire, the correspondences between the ladders
of the Elizabethan system seek also to depict uncertainty as a part of the Chain, as one
could fall from their place or move upward in the Chain. The intertwining concepts of
the correspondence between the macrocosm, body politic and microcosm in King Lear
inheres in the King and the response of external nature towards his being, especially in
the heath scene. And as the picture of the correspondences, King Lear ’s rage—the
comm otion within the m icrocosm of the body politic caused by his daughters’
ingratitude, the break of the Chain of Being—is echoed extensively in the storm
breaking out in the world of external nature. The scene depicts the chaos caused by the
fall of the great man to the basest status, running “unbonneted” under the turbulent
storm (scene 8, 13).
The correspondences are also the indication of the privileging of the
protagonists’ absolute authority in canonical drama which is overturned in Bond’s
Lear through the absence of the connection between the macrocosm and the body
politic in his play. The typical identification with the nobility of classical and early
modern drama is overturned by illustrating the nobleman’s follies and the changes in
both ranks and ideology he has undergone. Here, one might argue that the locality in
which Bond places his drama is not the place where Elizabethan values would be
appropriate. Thus, the absences of these concepts seem normal. However, it should be
noted that the locality of Bond’s Lear—though with the presences of modern-seeming
technologies, such as the eye-removing machines and autopsy—is not intended to be
the every-day society of Bond’s contemporaries either. Rather, Lear’s world seems
mythical and is permeated with anachronism in order for Bond to be able to dramatize
aggression in its bleakest forms. Thus, these absences might seem to be natural yet
they are worthy of observation in considering Bond’s intertext of King Lear. Firstly,
2
Norden, J. (n.d.). A Christian familiar comfort quoted in Tillyard, 1982, p. 97.
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the absence of the relation between the macrocosm and the body politic—le roi
soleil—is a conspicuous illustration of the dethronement of King Lear’s absolute
authority. In Bond’s drama, nature is the external force, having no attachment to any
man’s fate. Having been defeated in the war, Bond’s Lear escapes into the woods.
However, unlike Shakeapeare’s King Lear, his fall from throne to terrestrial condition
does not cause any commotions in heaven or on earth. There were no storms, just
Lear feeding himself on a leftover mumbling to himself rather serenely, not bellowing
into the stormy night:
My daughters have taken the bread from my stomach. They grind it
with my tears and the cries of famished children—and eat. … and I
am famished dog that sits on the earth and howls. I open my mouth
and they place an old coin in my tongue. … I’m old and too weak to
climb out of this grave again.
(20).
The self-depiction of Lear here is beneath even the level of a normal human being,
and degrading if it were in King Lear’s case. Lear here is portrayed as a running-away
dog, asking for favor from his daughters. Moreover, Lear’s dethronement is even
portrayed as the right action for his daughters to perform, since he is such a despot.
King Lear’s rage is represented by the storm, showing the relation between the
microcosm and the body politic. When the king and the nobles are brought down to
the bottom of the chain, nature turns into chaos. In King Lear, when the King is
driven away to the heath, the rain and the sky seem to lament for his loss and for the
authority he has bestowed upon the wrong descendants. Unlike Lear, who is, though,
also escaping from his daughters to save his life, King Lear could retain his greatness
through the storm breaking out as if the macrocosm is outraging at the crime done to
its counterpart, the King.
Nature, in Lear, is portrayed as the sphere to nurture humanity’s biological
or psychological needs. Lear escapes into the woods for his life and is nurtured by the
Gravedigger’s Boy, the figure of the golden past. Thus, nature does not represent
anyone nor it deemed able to take revenge for anyone. The best nature could do in
Lear is to cure him from the corruption of civilization he has grown old with and
which he has set as a standard to raise his daughter and rule his subjects.
Redefinition of the idea of morality and its necessity for human being
The interconnections between law, order, morality and what is considered
natural human behavior is another correspondence between the social and the natural
in King Lear. However, Bond, in Lear, negates the significance of morality in relation
to man’s well-being through his portrayal of their tyranny, in forms of law and order,
imposed upon the human instinctive biological needs—the source of aggression in
society.
In King Lear, custom and morality act as the “expression of the inner
pattern of nature, the basis of law and the practical guide for man” (Danby, 1969, p.
25). The idea of morality in Shakespeare is metaphysical and transcendental—the idea
through which law and order are originated. First, there are the concepts of virtue and
restraint as the striving for perfection to the upper hierarchy in the chain: the ideals
needed to keep society safe, sound and in control. Morality in King Lear finds its
absolute paragon in Cordelia. The virtue that is both the cause of the downfall and the
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demonstration that her character reflects her level in the hierarchy is sincerity as
shown in Cordelia’s honesty in the love trial. The other key virtue is restraint, the
quality by which the best of mankind and nobility is distinguished, as Cordelia’s
restraint of her sorrow in learning the fate of her beloved father is analogous to the
beauty of nature and the preciousness of jewels:
… Patience and sorrow strove
Who should express her goodliest. You have seen
Sunshine and rain at once; …
As pearls from diamonds dropped …
(Scene 17, 18-22)
Cordelia, with her honesty restraint and gratitude, is “an integration of nature”—the
traditional morality, an absolute apex of the value of nature man has to aspire to
(Danby, part. 1, chap. 3).
Bond, in his intertext, presents the evil of social morality as the destructive
unnatural force taken for granted to be “natural” in King Lear. And his characters are
regulated by social morality, which is comparable to those in Shakespeare who live
their lives according to the sets of values established by social institutions. Bond also
insists on the ominous political implication of the ideas of virtue and restraint created
by social institutions. In Lear, Bond’s Cordelia, like her counterpart in King Lear, is
the product of the same system as Lear. Bond does not see Cordelia’s gratitude and
patience as virtues, but as representative of social morality which will continue the
tyrannical society a monarchy like King Lear and his Lear have created. In King
Lear, the idea of virtue and morality is initiated by the Elizabethan belief in the
hierarchy of beings and the righteous authority of the ruler who has been anointed by
the divinity to have his right as the monarch. In Lear, the ideas of virtue and morality
still follow the sam e pattern, but Bond criticizes the system by show ing the
destructive consequences that follow along with it. Bond re-characterizes the new
Cordelia, the daughter not of a tyrannical king father but of a priest whose standard of
social morality is inherited by her, to show that a person who is seen as virtuous could
just be the same kind of ruler as Lear has been. This is because both Cordelias have
been raised to be “true” as far as what they believe as virtue and law permit them. And
the law, as Lear comments, “always does more harm than crime” and morality is “a
form of violence” (pp. 98-99). Cordelia’s society is the same as Lear’s. She tells Lear
that they will create the society Lear “dream[s] of.” (p. 98) She is raised to believe
that to “put a fence” around their house and “shut everyone else out” is a sound way
to live (p. 30). After her pastoral sphere in the woods in which she lives with the
Gravedigger’s Boy has been destroyed because of Lear’s intrusion, Cordelia becomes
a new despotic ruler and continues the construction of the wall. Her system of
morality is not different from that of Lear when he was king. The virtue of Cordelia’s
guerrilla is that only one who “hates” can be trusted, which indicates that her rule has
created sets of law and regulations that would do more harm than crime as Lear says
(p. 51).
Furthermore, the idea of patience, as revered in Shakespeare’s drama, is
undermined by Bond through his illustrations of its ominous political implications
created by social institutions. In Shakespeare, as Wilson Knight has pointed out
“Mankind are … continually being ennobled by suffering” (Knight, 2001, p.222).
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There is beauty and philosophical greatness in humanity’s pain and their ability to
endure brutality, as described earlier in the scenes of King Lear on the heath and
Cordelia’s sorrow or even in Gloucester’s blinding, as if they were processes of
perfecting humanity to its ideal form. In Bond’s play, the anachronisms dramatize the
brutality to make his audiences realize that the grand emotional impact of human ’s
plights in King Lear has fogged the fact that people are violent because they are living
in incongruity with their natural existence. Bodice and Fontanelle are violent, as seen
in their cruelty towards Warrington, because they have grown up all their life seeing
the inhuman manner with which their father has treated the workers on the wall.
The characters in Bond are represented to be living in a techno -sphere
where everything relies on human-constructed objects, depriving man of the ability to
gratify his biological desire. The maps blind the councilor from his commonsense of
locality and later perform as Bodice’s straitjacket incarcerating her as the slave of her
own authority. The eye-removing machine is also a tool devised by technological
advance only to make human suffering more casual. The eye-removing scene here
functions similarly to Gloucester’s blinding in King Lear. The scene of Gloucester’s
blinding, especially for the Elizabethan audience, is cruel and graphic. However,
B ond stages the eye-rem oving scene of Lear as if it w ere a casual practice,
accentuating his criticism of the modern worldview towards cruelty. Since man has
tried to make it look as if pain is comfortable, the casualness of the removal of Lear’s
eyes implies that people in Bond’s society are even more brutal. These technological
devices are developed in opposition to humanity’s instinctive and biological desires.
W hat m an essentially needs is love, like King Lear, and to be raised with care
regardless of regulation and decorum.
For Bond, “a state of moral maturity demands a course of action that
conflicts with the limits set by society” (Scharine, 1976, pp. 190-191). His Lear, at the
end of the play, performs such actions. Though he announces that he is “not fit as [he]
was” a politically moralistic despot, he could still make his “mark” (p. 102). In this
action, Lear dem onstrates, first, the act of change to his society by trying to
exterminate the limits of society—the wall—he has set up by himself. Second, he
takes the responsibility for the harms he has initiated into his society and shows the
later generations working around the wall that they too could change their society.
Amplification of social criticism implicit in Shakespeare
Justice in King Lear and Lear
A traditional response … tends to treat Shakespeare as if he had the
self-knowledge of modern man and fails to acknowledge the Tudor
values that inform the text. … Lear …was the most radical of all
critics but Lear’s insight was expressed as madness or hysteria,
because at the time it was the only coherent way such perceptions
could be organized.
(Bond, 1970, p. 24)
Justice in King Lear seems to be bestowed upon those conforming to the
codes of society—the king and parents obeyed, virtue measured by gratitude, patience,
and loyalty—as seen in the case of Cordelia’s reconciliation with King Lear, and
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Kent’s and Edgar’s restoration to their positions. However, if considering the ways in
which Shakespeare characterized his antagonists, as well as King Lear himself in his
insanity, as “the spokesmen to subversive truth” and the eventual downfalls of his
protagonists, it appears that Shakespeare in King Lear—as seen by many critics as well
as by Bond—was also challenging his own canon and decorum.3 But he might not be
able to criticize his system so explicitly because of the Renaissance authority and
censorship. The quotation taken from Bond’s interview is distinct evidence of Bond’s
account of King Lear. In Lear, justice is defined by the ways in which man can live in
his natural way, the ways man’s biological and psychological requirements agree with,
as Bond has pointed out in his Preface to Lear that “[j]ustice is allowing people to live
in the way for which they evolved” (Bond, p. 9). The way Bond amplifies the criticism
of the justice system by Shakespeare can be seen in the overturn of poetic justice, the
illu stration of m an ’s desire to be free from socialized institution s an d th e
magnification of the brutal comedy (called grotesque by many critics) in King Lear.
The idea of absolute monarchy in Elizabethan society helps eradicate or at
least reduce the wrongs done by King Lear to his daughters. However, the plights King
Lear has gone through can be accounted for as reimbursement he has to pay back to
those he has wronged. In the modern society of Bond, where such an idea is no longer
important, King Lear’s fault can be perceived more easily. Bond amplifies King Lear’s
fault in Lear by re-constructing the new conclusion of poetic justice in a different
direction from that in Shakespeare. King Lear and Lear operate their power through
infantile egocentricity and they have to suffer its consequence by undergoing the
condition they have imposed upon others. King Lear has to undergo suffering for
having done wrong to Cordelia and Kent. His escape into the heath–though seen by
som e as purification—is palpably degradation—especially within Elizabethan
doctrine—and is a punishment for his loss of reason. Bond makes Lear responsible for
the type of society and people he has created by teaching people of a just and liberated
society through the analogy of the bird whose beautiful voice is lost after having been
put in a cage, and by taking action in destroying the wall though he has to pay for it
with his life.
The criticism of justice in King Lear and Lear’s presentation of man’s need
to be free from socialized institutions and their rituals is also a social criticism implied
by Shakespeare that Bond has amplified in Lear. The nature of justice in King Lear is
innate as a part of the center of the society, the King. In Shakespeare’s play, nature is
regarded as existing in forms of law, order and social institutions in accordance with
the power of the King. However, King Lear’s absolute authority is also overturned
along with the idea that King is the embodiment of justice. King Lear’s “When I do
stare, see how the subject quakes” is undermined by the mockery of the trial of the
“join-stool” (scene 13, 47). Justice in King Lear cannot perform its expected function
as the punisher of the wrongdoer, since the mock trial of King Lear is operated by
madmen and a fool. In portraying the trial thus, justice also is shown in its most
3
I would like to express my thanks to Ajarn Jeffrey Kramer (Department of
English Language and Literature, Faculty of Liberal Arts, Thammasat University).
The quotation is from a note I have taken during his lecture on Shakespeare in 2011.
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absurd form as an exercise of power and vengeance of the powerless.
The criticism of justice in Lear and Bond’s presentation of man’s need to
be free from socialized institutions and their rituals is shown in the trial, a form of
social ritual, of Lear set up by Bodice and Fontanelle. The criticism of justice that is
implicit in King Lear is exploited by Bond. In his note written before writing Lear,
Bond pictures Lear as “a man who has been in prison for a long time. He is released
and goes through the tragedy of freedom.4 This is the process through which Lear,
similarly to King Lear, has gone through his education and has learned to differentiate
between justice and righteousness through being nurtured by nature. Thus, when he
comes back to society, he acts as a healthier human being—urging the cause of man’s
freedom from moralized institutions. Rather than suggesting the crudity of justice
implicitly as in Shakespeare, Bond directly criticizes the system in its skeleton form.
Bodice tells the judge to “goad [Lear] if it helps—but not too openly” (p.38). Lear
says he gave the judge his job because he was “corrupt” (p. 40). Also, Lear sees an
image of himself in the mirror as an animal in “a little cage of bars,” signifying the
condition of hum an beings under the power of social institution s that entitle
themselves as justice to override those under their power. Lear’s description of the
image of the animal in the cage illustrates how much social institution are cages
cruelly incarcerating man in unnatural manners: “who shut that animal in a glass cage
… You let it lick the blood from its hair in the corner of a cage with nowhere to hide
from its tormentors.” And during such description, Lear calls for the fundamental
emotion that would originate “change” in his society, which is to “have pity!” (pp. 4041).
In addition to his redefining the idea of society and amplifying the social
criticisms Shakespeare in King Lear has not made sufficiently explicit, the final action
of Lear depicts Bond’s Lear taking action. As grand as the deaths of King Lear and
Cordelia are in their representation of the falling apart of the transcendental values of
King Lear, Lear’s death over the wall, though he is not surrounded by his lamenting
subjects, promises the second coming of “one more” revolution over the wall (p. 102).
4
Bond, E. (2000-2001). Selections from the notebooks of Edward Bond,
covering 1959-95. Eyre Methuen, quoted in Hay & Roberts, 1980. P. 109.
11
References
Books
Allen, G. (2011). Postmodern conclusions. In Intertextuality: Second edition. (2nd
ed.). New York: Routledge.
Bloom, H. (1998). Shakespeare: The invention of the human. New York: Riverhead
Books.
Bond, E. (1972). Lear. London: Eyre Methuen.
Bradley, A. C. (1993). Shakespearean tragedies: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King
Lear, Macbeth. (3rd ed.). Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Coult, T. (1977). The plays of Edward Bond: A study. London: Methuen.
Danby, J. F. (1968). Shakespeare’s doctrine of nature: A study of King Lear. London:
Faber and Faber.
Hay, M. & Roberts, P. (1980). Lear. In Bond: a study of his plays. London: Eyre
Methuen.
Kermode, F. (2001). King Lear. In Shakespeare’s language. London: Penguin Books.
Knight, W. (2001). The wheel of fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean tragedy. New
York: Routledge.
Kott, J. (2004). King Lear or Endgame. In R. McDonald (Ed.). Shakespeare: an
anthology of criticism and theory, 1945-2000. (pp. 174-190). Oxford:
Blackwell.
Lappin. L. (1987). The art and politics of Edward Bond. New York: Peter Lang.
Scharine, R.G. (1976). The Plays of Edward Bond. Lewisburg: Bucknell University
Press.
Shakespeare, W. (1608). ed. by Wells, S. (2001). King Lear. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Spencer, Jenny S. (1992). Dramatic Strategies in the Plays of Edward Bond.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stuart, I. (Ed.). (1995, 1996, 1998, 2001). Edward Bond Letters. (Vols. 1-5). London:
Routledge/ Taylor & Francis.
Stuart, I. (1996). Politics in performance: The production work of Edward Bond,
1978-1990. (n.p.): Peter Lang.
Tillyard, E.M.W. (1982). The Elizabethan world picture. (Repr. ed.). Middlesex:
Penguin.
Tillyard, E.M.W. (2004). The cosmic background. In R. McDonald (Ed.).
Shakespeare: an anthology of criticism and theory, 1945-2000. (pp. 422434). Oxford: Blackwell.
Trussler, S. (1976). Edward Bond. England: Longman.
Articles
Bond, E. (1970). A discussion with Edward Bond. Gambit, 7.
Bond, E. (interviewee), Stoll, K.(interviewer) , & Wesker, A. (December, 1976).
Interviews with Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker. Twentieth Century
Literature, 22(4), 411-432.
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Castillo, D. A. (Summer, 1986). Dehumanized or inhuman: Doubles in Edward Bond.
South Central Review, 3(2), 78-89.
Eagleton, T. (n.d.). Nature and violence: the prefaces of Edward Bond. Critical
Quarterly, 26(1&2), 127-135.
Garner, S. B., Jr. (May, 1990). Post-Brechtian anatomies: Weiss, Bond, and the
politics of embodiment. Theatre Journal, 42(2), 145-164.
Jones, D. R. (December, 1980). Edward Bond’s rational theatre. Theatre Journal,
32(4), 505-517.
Electronic media
Holland, P. (2002). King Lear and its afterlife. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. Retrieved April 11, 2012, from
http://assets.cambridge.org/052181/5878/sample/0521815878ws.pdf