Title: The Storm in King Lear
Author(s): Susan Viguers
Publication Details: CLA Journal 43.3 (Mar. 2000): p338-366.
Source: Shakespearean Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 83. Detroit: Gale, 2004. From Literature
Resource Center.
Document Type: Critical essay
Bookmark: Bookmark this Document
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
[(essay date March 2000) In the following essay, Viguers theorizes how the storm scene in King Lear
would have been staged during Shakespeare's time and maintains that many modern presentations
ignore important staging clues in the text.]
The past twenty years have made us acutely aware of written texts as problematic, a perception
given even more obvious weight in regard to King Lear by the existence of two primary texts, the First
Quarto and the First Folio, and the argument that they represent different playwright-created versions
of the play. And, of course, once we look at the play not as literature but as theater, as this article is
doing, its problematic status is compounded. Theatrical performance is less stable than literature or
even another performance medium such as film. "When one puts on a play," comments Peter Brook
in The Open Door, "inevitably, at the beginning it has no form, it is just words on paper or ideas. The
event is the shaping of the form. What one calls the work is the search for the right form. If this work
is successful, the result can eventually last for a few years, but no more."1 Although concerned with
modern productions of the play, the argument of this article begins with the play's original form on
Shakespeare's stage--which takes us even further down the road of the problematic. Brook pointedly
dismisses at least a certain kind of interest in that "original" production:
Many years ago, it used to be claimed that one must "perform the play as Shakespeare wrote it."
Today the absurdity of this is more or less recognized: nobody knows what scenic form he had in
mind. All that one knows is that he wrote a chain of words that have in them the possibility of giving
birth to forms that are constantly renewed.2
My bias is to agree with Brook that Shakespeare "is always relevant and always contemporary"
precisely because his plays give "birth to forms that are constantly renewed."3 On the other hand, I
would not describe Shakespeare as composing "a chain of words." Scholars for years have argued
that Shakespeare was writing for the theater, in the context of a particular stage and set of stage
conventions. Elements of the theater space and staging are embedded in the actual text of the play.
Productions had to be developed quickly, with little rehearsal and little direction. Bernard Beckerman
in his analysis of Philip Henslowe's Diary summarizes that in the six months between August 25,
1595, and February 28, 1596, Lord Admiral's company "gave one hundred and fifty performances of
thirty different plays. Eighty-seven performances ... were of the fourteen new plays produced that
season"4 A chart included by Beckerman in an appendix to Shakespeare at the Globe reveals that of
the one hundred thirteen plays performed between 1592 and 1597, thirty-four were performed only
one or two times and only thirty-five were performed more than ten times.5 Moreover, a play
produced on one day would not be presented the next.6 A similar pattern presumably characterized
Shakespeare's company. The implications are significant. Staging must have been guided by
convention and clear signals in the text, and we are missing an essential part of that text if we do not
read those signals. I am not suggesting that the original production would be successful on today's
stage, but I am privileging that original production (even a hypothetical vision of that production).
The subject of this inquiry is the portrayal of the storm in Lear. Arnold Kettle describes the importance
of the storm in a way that seems to me a commonplace of criticism:
The storm in Lear "works" artistically on a number of levels: the elemental storm, the social storm
which shakes the divided kingdom, the inner storm that drives Lear mad, all are interconnected and
reinforce one another to achieve what is, I suppose, the most extraordinary and harrowing
representation of crisis in the whole of art.7
Few critics have examined the play in depth without discussing the storm as an image central to the
play's power and philosophy. There has been less attention given to how the storm would have been
represented in an original production.8 This article focuses on that delineation of the storm, one that
in part would have been realized by the physical movement of characters on stage. I argue that
imagining the original staging of the storm scenes can contribute to a modern experience of the play-even aid in the creation of a production of the play.
II
In no other play of Shakespeare does such a sustained event of nature share the stage with the
characters. The lack of sets on Shakespeare's stage meant, of course, that characters carried their
settings with them. The storm would have been evoked through their words and actions.
Nonetheless, the Folio seven times notes in stage directions the storm's presence, suggesting that
there was some external representation of the storm on the stage. Lear himself catalogues four
elements of the storm: "rain, wind, thunder, fire" (3.2.15).9 There is no evidence that water actually fell
on the stage,10 although it is not impossible that characters entered wet, like the mariners in the first
scene of The Tempest. If wind and thunder--the next two elements listed by Lear--were actually
represented on stage, they would have been by sound. In the lines of the play, the winds "sorely
ruffle" (2.4.303); they "crack" their "cheeks" (3.2.1). Thunder also "crack[s]" (3.2.8), as well as
"Rumbles[s]" (14). Ben Jonson in the prologue to his 1616 edition of Every Man in His Humour
speaks in disparagement of the use of "roul'd bullet heard / To say, it thunders." "[T]empestuous
drumme / Rumbles," he continues his complaint, "to tell you when the storme doth come." 11 Act 4 of
the early seventeenth-century play The Birth of Hercules ends with the stage direction "ye Drums for
thunder"12 announcing a great storm, one described by the handmaiden Bromia in the next scene as
"such a thunderinge and lightening ... [that] we in the house fell flatt to the grounde for feare."13 It is
quite possible that the only indication of the storm in Lear was a cannon sounding from the upper
story of the theater, a "roul'd bullet," or "tempestuous drumme."
Thunder and the word "crack" evoke lightning. The fourth element of the storm in Lear's catalogue is
fire, and the association of lightning with fire is typical of Renaissance plays. "You sulph'rous and
thought-executing fires, / Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts," cries Lear, "Singe my white
head!" (3.2.4-6). "Spit, fire!" (114), he exclaims a moment later. Squibs and fireworks were common
entertainments (theatrical and other) of the time.14 In his negative reference to current stage practices
in the prologue to Every Man in His Humour, Johnson also mentions the "nimble squibbe" which
"make afear'd / The gentlewomen" (17-18). Elaborate pyrotechnic spectacle, however, of the sort
seen in George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar at the Rose or in Thomas Heywood's Ages plays at the
Red Bull did not characterize the Globe.15 Another famous Shakespeare storm begins The Tempest.
The stage direction, "A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard," 16 suggests that lightning
was represented by noise, just as thunder was. It is quite possible there were no fireworks at all in the
original production of Lear. In any case, fireworks hardly supplied realistic images of lightning. It must
be remembered that Lear, like other public theater plays, was performed in generalized afternoon
light. The gloomy darkness of a storm, a sky lit up with lightning, would not have been possible.
Critics have repeatedly noted the efficacy of the language of the play to conjure up the storm. Lear's
"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks" (3.2.1) is among the best-known lines in the play. Jonathan
Goldberg, in his article on the Dover Cliff scene, in contrasting Edgar's remarkably illusionistic
description of the cliffs with the prologue of the Chorus in Henry V, points to "the emphasis" in the
Chorus's speech on the "verbal, on the power of words to work on the imagination."17 Unlike the
"reduction" implied by the "illusionistic representation"18 of Edgar's vision, the Chorus respects "the
limits of representation."19 The same can be said about the depiction of the storm in Lear. The
language is dense and highly figurative. It evokes rather than describes. And although the storm is
anthropomorphized through words such as "blow," "rage," "spit," "groans," "cheeks," "wrathful,"
"eyeless," "bellyfull," it is not rendered emblematic. It does not, to use Hannah Arendt's definition of
emblems, refer to "already visible illustrations of something invisible."20 Lear's cry "And thou, allshaking thunder, / Strike flat the thick rotundity o'th'world! / Crack Nature's moulds, all germains spill
at once" (3.2.6-8) compounds images: a storm, an enraged human being, Jove himself, the world as
a globe, pregnancy. And essential to the power of the language is its slow, ponderous rhythm with its
charged stops; in only eight syllables, "Strike flat the thick rotundity," there are six stops (k,t,k,t,d,t).
Figurative language--unless it is emblematic or unless, to quote Arendt again, it is made up of
"outworn analogies that have turned into idioms"21--cannot be literalized. "Metaphor is the means by
which the thinking mind seeks to understand inward and invisible activities,22 says Arendt. I would
argue that for Shakespeare the storm in part remains inward and invisible.
It is useful to compare the storm in Lear to that in The Battle of Alcazar. The prologue to Act 5 in
Peele's play includes a dumb show full of spectacle: "Lightning and thunder," (1165), a "blazing
Starre" (1175), "Fire workes" (1178).23 The Presenter's delineation of how the dumb show reveals
what is to unfold on stage functions much like the verse accompanying a picture in an emblem book:
"Fire, fire about the axiltree of heaven," he tells us, "Woorles round, and from the foot of Casyopa, / In
fatall houre consumes these fatall crownes" (1177-79). Kent's description of the storm works quite
differently: "Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder, / Such groans of roaring wind and
rain," he exclaims, "I never / Remember to have heard; man's nature cannot carry / Th'affliction nor
the fear" (3.2.46-49). His emphasis is on the storm as beyond human endurance, beyond knowledge.
In The Battle of Alcazar the Presenter's words depend on and necessitate spectacle; in Lear an effort
to visualize the words through spectacle would reduce them and the significance of the storm.
There is no way of knowing conclusively if the storm in Lear was heard only at those seven times
indicated by the Folio stage directions, but I suggest that in fact it was. That hypothesis--and my final
reason for arguing against the position of the critic who assumes, like Marvin Rosenberg, that
Shakespeare used elements of spectacle "lavishly" to create the storm24--is based on three
perceptions about the careful timing of the directions: (1) The storm sounds occur so as not to
confuse the audience about the setting for scenes. When the words "Storm still" are present at the
beginning of a scene, as they are with 3.1 and 3.2, they define the setting for both characters exiting
and those entering. The characters exiting at the end of 3.3 inhabit an inside setting; thus, rather than
"Storm still" coming at the beginning of 3.4, the Folio gives us that direction shortly after the
characters in the new scene have entered, and after, presumably, the actors in the previous one
have exited. (2) The sounds of the storm come at moments that would not drown out dialogue. They
always occur at one of two times: before the dialogue begins, as in 3.1 and 3.2, where the first lines
suggest that the characters speak several moments after entering, or when a pause or a momentary
break is useful. (3) The storm sounds always relate to the dialogue on stage. (The support for my last
two points will emerge in part III of this article.)
III
The storm, although not present as illusion or emblematic spectacle, was extremely important in all
four scenes in which it was heard on Shakespeare's stage. The storm is, of course, central to both
the plot and the theme of the play. Less obvious, the timing of the storm sounds would have made
the storm a presence to be responded to rather than simply a context. Such a statement is
commonplace in regard to Lear's "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks" at the beginning of 3.2, but I
suggest that the storm also relates to the dialogue at the other times the Folio indicates it is heard
and, when it does, it evokes and is aligned to Lear's evil daughters. I do not intend a reductive
contracting of the metaphorical meaning of the storm, but emphasizing that connection grounds those
scenes in the dramatic plot, in the emotional rather than the metaphysical. Perceiving that alignment,
moreover, gives focus and depth to the lines preceding or following the sound of the storm,
particularly the five times that the storm interrupts a scene. Finally, I argue that visually the storm
scenes on Shakespeare's stage would have been played out as an enactment of the characters'
efforts either, on the one hand, to avoid or mitigate the harshness of the tempest or, on the other, to
confront, immerse themselves, or commune with it. And for the choreography of that movement,
Shakespeare's stage itself, a thrust platform with at least two doors on the upstage wall, was
essential.
The first time we hear the storm is near the end of the momentous fourth scene of Act 2. The stage is
full. Lear stands before his two oldest daughters, stripped of his followers, his dignity, his identity, all
that separates him from a "life" as "cheap as beast's" (269). "I will have such revenges on you both,"
he cries,
That all the world shall--I will do such things,
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I'll weep;
No I'll not weep:
I have full cause of weeping,
(281-86)
It is at this point that the storm announces itself.25 It encapsulates his cause for weeping, calling up
an image of chaos and dissolution, the ominous voice of both physical and moral nature, and
recapitulating the voice of his daughters. And the pause in Lear's speech that the sound of the storm
necessitates allows for a shift to the cry of denial and pain that propels him off the stage into the
storm:
but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I'll weep. O Fool, I shall go mad!
(286-88)
The scene climaxes as Lear, after that line, rushes out one door of the stage into the storm.
The dialogue among the remaining characters making up the concluding beat of the scene powerfully
creates the sense of a threatening, impending storm. The final movement is shaped by Cornwall's
urging those on stage to exit (a door other than the one used by Lear) out of (rather than into) the
storm. The first line after Lear leaves is Cornwall's, "Let us withdraw, 'twill be a storm" (289), as are
the last lines, "'tis a wild night: / My Regan counsels well: come out o'th'storm" (310-11). The tension
at the center of the scene's final movement is between Cornwall's desire to sweep everyone on stage
out one door, which represents going into the castle--a movement that articulates abandoning Lear to
the storm--and Gloucester's impotent desire--visualized by his brief, anxious exit with Lear and then
his return--to bring Lear back through the door he exited.
The next two scenes, 3.1 and 3.2, the Folio stage directions tell us, begin with the sound of the
storm--giving us the setting for both the characters exiting and those entering. The storm has taken
over the stage. In both scenes the first line is an explicit response to the storm's voice. "Who's there,
besides foul weather?" calls out Kent to a Gentleman in 3.1. The question defines the storm as a
presence almost in the sense of another character. The words that begin 3.2 are Lear's to that
presence itself: "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!" In both, the primary evocation is of the storm
as a phenomenon of nature, but in both the identification goes further to allude to Goneril and Regan.
In 3.1 the Gentleman moves from a description of the raging king to "His heart-strook injuries" (17),
and Kent proceeds to inform the Gentleman of France's (and Cordelia's) knowledge of the
mistreatment Lear has suffered. In 3.2 the Fool immediately responds to Lear's opening cry to the
elements with "O Nuncle, court holy-water in a dry house is better than this rainwater out o'door.
Good Nuncle, in; ask thy daughters' blessing" (10-12). Lear moves quickly from addressing the storm
to his daughters:
Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness.
(14-16)
The impartiality of the elements dissipates as he connects them to his daughters:
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That will with two pernicious daughters join
Your high-engender'd battles 'gainst a head
So old and white as this.
(21-24)
Both scenes are structured as movements against or aligned with the storm, to avoid or to confront it.
In 3.1 Kent and the Gentleman enter from two different doors. The storm is on stage. Their concern is
to find the king and get him to safety, but they are caught in the confusion of the tumultuous
elements. The conflict in the scene lies in their fighting the weather--"Fie on this storm!" (49) cries
Kent--and their lack of clear direction. They stumble on each other. They do not know where Lear is.
They go off in different directions, exiting "severally." Kent's words end the scene: "[W]hen we have
found the King, in which your pain / That way, I'll this, he that first lights on him / Hallo the other" (5355). In 3.2 the tension is between Lear's desire to confront the storm, to interrogate and investigate it-implications, not just for himself, but for humankind--and the desire of the Fool and Kent for him to
avoid it. The Fool begs him to find shelter and mocks him for his foolishness in being unhoused; and
Kent, entering mid-scene, takes over, urging Lear to take refuge in a nearby hovel. "Hovel," with its
connotation of shelter, is an anchoring word at the end of the scene, spoken three times in seventeen
lines. The scene begins with Lear's confronting and communing with the storm and ends with his
exiting with Kent, followed a moment later by the Fool, toward the hovel. In both scenes, exiting and
what that means about the characters' relationship to the storm is not simply an ending, but the
concluding purpose of the scene's movement. In 3.1 Kent and the Gentleman go to find Lear; in 3.2
Lear gives in to Kent's and the Fool's urging: "Come," he says to Kent, "bring us to this hovel" (78).
The storm's importance reaches its climax in the long, complex 3.4, the only scene in which the storm
is heard not once, but four times, once in the first part, twice in the second, and once in the scene's
final movement.26 Its initial sounding occurs not as the characters enter, but shortly after, immediately
following and giving substance to Kent's words "The tyranny of the open night's too rough / For
nature to endure" (2-3). The storm's voice, however, also summons up Lear's cruel daughters, for
when Lear responds, "Let me alone" (3), although he is ostensibly talking to Kent, he can also be
seen as speaking to the elements of the storm or "ministers" of Goneril and Regan. Kent returns with
"Good my lord, enter here" (4), and Lear's words "Wilt break my heart?" (4) can be interpreted not
only as directed toward Kent, but also, even more obviously, toward the storm, conflated with his
daughters. Kent believes Lear is speaking to him--"I'd rather break my own" (5), he says--but Lear
answers with lines that remind us how focused he is on the storm (6-22), and although he speaks first
of the comfort it supplies, inevitably it calls forth thoughts of his daughters' tyranny: "In such a night /
To shut me out?" (17-18).
The next two times the storm reminds us of its presence, it cuts off the chaotic, frenzied ramblings of
Tom o'Bedlam. He is not capable of closure; he needs the interruption that the voice of the storm
provides. And on both occasions, Lear follows with words suggesting that the storm is defined in
terms of his daughters. The first time, he confounds the storm's meaning for him with that for the
madman, thus producing: "has his daughter brought him to this pass?" (63). In response to the
storm's interruption of Tom o'Bedlam the second time, Lear alludes explicitly to its presence: "Thou
wert better in a grave," he says to the disguised Edgar, "than to answer with thy uncover'd body this
extremity of the skies" (103-05). The word "answer" conjures up the image of a dialogue with the
storm. It is an interchange, moreover, that reminds us of the storm's collusion with Goneril and Regan
by echoing the end of Act 2 when Lear's answer to the storm (and his daughters) was to leave the
security of shelter, to become "houseless."
The storm's final pronouncement comes in the midst of an exchange between the faithful Kent and
Gloucester. The king's "wits begin t'unsettle" (166), explains Kent. "Canst thou blame him?" (166)
responds Gloucester. The reason one cannot blame him, the cause of his encroaching madness--his
daughters' cruelty--then announces itself in the sounding of the storm. Gloucester's words following
that noise can be read as a straightforward gloss on the storm's voice: "His daughters seek his death"
(167).
In 3.4, as well as the three scenes previously discussed, the characters' relation to the storm--their
desire to embrace or escape it--structures the blocking. And for that blocking the stage doors have
considerable importance.
The text implies that the scene begins with Kent, Lear, and the Fool entering through one door and
crossing to the door representing the hovel. The first words of the scene, spoken by Kent, would not
make sense if said immediately upon entering the stage: "Here is the place, my Lord. Good my Lord,
enter." The movement to the object of the word "here" anchors the audience's attention on the door.
It is that door, marking the hovel, that focuses the dynamics of the first part of the scene. Three more
times in the next few moments Kent urges Lear to enter. Three times Lear directs Kent or the Fool
toward the door. While Lear mediates on "Poor naked wretches" (28), the Fool does go in, only to
burst out crying, "Come not in here, Nuncle; here's a spirit" (39). "Come forth" (44), cries Kent to the
spirit on the other side of the door, and Tom o'Bedlam emerges from within.
J. L. Styan pictures Lear as showing his indifference to Kent's efforts to get him out of the storm "by a
sequence of avoiding movements which carry him down to the edge of the platform."27 The text
indicates that Lear must be farther away from the hovel door than Kent, for it is Kent who gives the
Fool his hand when he bursts from the hut. Lear's immersion in the storm is visualized by his moving
away from the hovel door, separating himself from the Fool and Kent, who are focused on taking
refuge from the storm.
The potency of the hovel door is realized with its belching forth Edgar, the catalyst of the scene's
second part. Edgar moves downstage from the door, pushing the other characters aside, propelling
them from the entrance, as he comes out crying, "Away! the foul fiend follows me!" (45). His
movement away from the protection of the hovel defines him: rather than escape somewhere safe,
he has chosen, in assuming the disguise as Tom o'Bedlam, to be a participant, like Lear, in the moral
and physical harshness of the world symbolically represented by the storm. Edgar's second sentence
acknowledges the presence of the storm: "Through the sharp hawthorn blow the winds" (45-46). I see
his third--"Humh! go to thy bed and warm thee" (46-47)--as directed to Kent and the Fool.
This second part of the scene centers on the convergence of Lear and Edgar, immersed in the storm
and away from the protection represented by the hovel door. Kent and the Fool anxiously attend
Lear, speaking to him twice (65-66, 69), but it is Lear and Edgar who command the placement of the
action on stage. The text makes clear that all four characters are now far from the stage doors, for
when Gloucester enters, concluding part two of the scene, thirteen lines are spoken until, close but
still not upon them, he calls out, "What are you there? Your names?" (131). Edgar's rumblings,
interrupted and underscored by the storm's voice, not once but twice, build to the climax of the whole
scene, as well as this second part, and to what some feel is the turning point of the play. Gazing on
Tom o'Bedlam, Lear asks "Is man no more than this?" (105); he is "a poor, bare, forked animal"
(110), "unaccommodated man" (109). Lear tears at his clothing--"Off, off, your lendings!" (111)--an
image of his identification with "unaccommodated man," his shedding the last vestiges of his sanity,
his identity, the protection of civilization, of social and political structure, his abandonment to the
chaos of the storm. A few moments later, when Kent addresses him, "your Grace" (128), Lear
responds, "What's he?" (129). His climactic disrobing would have been played downstage, far from
the hovel door, the farthest point on the stage possible from escape from the storm.
Gloucester's coming to bring succor to the king, to take him to the shelter of a cottage, begins the
third part of 3.4. As he did at the beginning of the scene, Lear ignores or pushes aside the shelter
offered him, this time by embracing Tom o'Bedlam's company. "I will keep still with my philosopher"
(180), he declares. He and Edgar are visually linked. In this final part of the scene, the hovel door
again is important in focusing the dynamics of the movement on stage, but another door, the one
representing the way to Gloucester's cottage, has also become charged. The last fifty lines of the
scene are punctuated with phrases that reveal that physical, spatial tension between characters and
doors: "Go in with me," "go into th'house," "In, fellow," "Come let's in all," "this way," "Take him you
on," "come on," "Come." Gloucester and Kent seek to pull Lear toward the cottage and to push Edgar
toward the hut. Lear, bound to Edgar, moves with him to the hovel. "Come, let's in all" (179), he says,
meaning the hovel. Lear's movement forces Gloucester and Kent to relax their efforts to urge Edgar
toward the hovel. "Sirrah, come on," Kent finally say to Tom o'Bedlam; "go along with us" (183). The
holding, focusing power of the hovel door disappears, and all the characters exit through Gloucester's
door.
The storm's voice has been heard in all three parts of 3.4. After that, it is heard no more. Scene 6 of
Act 3 begins with the characters who were on the heath entering Gloucester's cottage and Gloucester
reminding us of the storm outside, now off-stage: "Here is better than the open air" (1), he says to
Kent. When Gloucester returns at the end of the scene to warn Kent that he must take Lear
immediately to Dover, there is no mention of driving through the storm. It is over. And the outside
settings for Lear and Gloucester from now on are not aligned with their cruel children. The storm on
the heath is associated with Lear's evil daughters; Dover has associations with the two redeeming
children, Cordelia and Edgar. Although still disguised, Edgar on reaching Dover immediately modifies
and then puts aside the identity of Tom o'Bedlam. "Methinks thy voice is alter'd, and thou speak'st / In
better phrase and matter than thou didst" (7-8), says Gloucester at the beginning of 4.6.
To summarize, the storm, as I have envisioned it on Shakespeare's stage, was not a context in which
to see Lear and his followers as much as a presence, one that, of course, supplied the setting for the
scenes, but which was non-illusionistic and theater-based in its conception. Rather than being
created on stage, it was depicted or evoked by carefully timed off-stage sounds, by the language of
the characters (both descriptive of the storm and in dialogue with it), and by movement that
depended on the particular physical parameters of the stage. That movement dramatized the tension
between efforts to avoid and those to interact with not only the natural elements, but the moral chaos,
the evil loosed and represented by Lear's elder daughters and, by extension through the mirroring of
the two plots, Gloucester's younger son.
IV
How does such a summary of Shakespeare's portrayal of the storm contribute to our understanding
of modern experiences of King Lear? I suggest that that rendering is so embedded in Shakespeare's
text that failure to understand it leads to dramatically unrealized and confusing visions of the storm
scenes. Such a statement is admittedly dangerous in light of the sheer variety and number of
readings and productions of the play, as well as my earlier agreement with Brook's concept of the
freshness of the forms that Shakespeare's plays give "birth to." But I am struck by how hard it is, in
my experience, for students--reading the play without envisioning it on Shakespeare's stage--to get a
handle on the storm scenes, in particular 3.4. Other teachers have supported that perception.
Frances Teague, for example, in an article in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's King Lear,
mentions in passing that her students find the storm episodes confusing.28
My students frequently miss the fact that there are two shelters, one referred to numerous times in
the text as a hovel and the other, a more substantial structure, which I have called Gloucester's
cottage.29 They are not alone in this. Leah Marcus, in her essay on the performance of the play in
1606 before the King at Whitehall, speaks of Lear's being shut out by "the doors of the great ones,"
finding shelter only in a "hovel," where he "puts 'cold' hospitality on trial,"30 clear reference to 3.6 and
the cottage. This apparent merging of hovel and cottage has no bearing on her argument, but it does
suggest how easy it is to miss that element in the plot, a detail which seems an extraneous
complication unless one sees its importance for the movement on stage, a movement which, I feel, is
essential in defining the storm's significance. In Ian Pollock's Illustrated King Lear, a careful (and, I
feel, often remarkable) comic-book rendering of the entire play, touted as an aid in helping students
understand Shakespeare, there are no visual clues distinguishing the cottage from the hovel. In fact,
it is logical to assume that the characters go into the hovel at the end of Pollock's vision of 3.4,
making the lines spoken confusing.31 Patricia E. Tatspaugh's review of the Old Vic Theater's 1989
production of King Lear would seem to imply that in that production, also, the characters on stage
went into the hovel.32 The lack of clarity in some articles and reviews may simply be the result of the
authors' using the word "hovel" to refer to Gloucester's cottage.33 In the case of reviews, it also
suggests, however, at least the possibility that the productions themselves failed to differentiate
between the two structures.
The storm as metaphor is clearly important in envisioning modern productions of the play. Rosette C.
Lamont describes the Rustaveli Theater Company's 1990 production at the Brooklyn Academy of
Music as culminating in "the scenery crashing down ... tantamount to the destruction of the world."34
And in the Adrian Noble production of the Royal Shakespeare Company in the winter season of
1993-94, "a massive globe," George L. Geckle tells us, hung "ominously over the set from the
beginning of 2.3 ... until the blinding of Gloucester and the wounding of Cornwall in 3.7." After
Cornwall was "fatally wounded in the groin, the globe split ... open in a tremendous coup de theatre to
release ... sand ... meant to recall Lear's lines in 3.2: 'Crack Nature's moulds, all germens spill at
once / That makes ingrateful man.'"35
In reading the reviews for the past ten years of productions of King Lear in the Shakespeare Bulletin
and the Shakespeare Quarterly, however, I find particularly striking how infrequently the storm is
spoken of at all--in not more than one half of the reviews. And when it is mentioned in connection to a
scene, it is often in reference to 3.2, which many times is spoken of as "the" storm scene. "The
production's most effective scene," says Justin Shaltz in his review of the Shakespeare Repertory
production in Chicago in 1993, "is the storm scene, with Lear standing defiantly and raging and the
Fool cowering on his knees. Deeply set atop a raised ledge of broken stage and back-lit against a
swirling grey storm background, the two brave the archetypal storm together, visibly shaken by
deafening peals of thunder and staggering on the rocks in brilliant flashes of strobe lightning. Lear's
hoarse cries and shouts--'spit, fire! spout rain!'--are dramatically amplifed, his passion competing with
bursts of thunder and cracks of lightning."36 My conjecture is that in many productions 3.2 is
memorable in a way that 3.4 is not.
Shakespeare structured his play, I believe, with the climax of the storm not in the short 3.2 but in 3.4,
the only scene in which the voice of the storm is heard more than once. The first two scenes of Act 3
are both short and structurally simple enough to allow for one sustained beat, but that is not true of
3.4. In that scene, the storm cannot be conceived, as is possible in 3.2, as simply Lear's antagonist,
the force against which he rages; its presence must be delineated in such a way that the characters
in the play change, evolve, reveal themselves. If that does not happen, 3.4 emerges as confusing,
long, and anticlimactic.
That is how I would describe the storm sequence in two of the most frequently seen films of the play,
the 1982 BBC production directed by Jonathan Miller starring Michael Hordern and the 1983
Granada television production directed by Michael Elliott starring Laurence Olivier. Those films are
well known because they are the creations of important and well-positioned artists and because they
seem theater based. They are both used to help students understand the play as theater. I see their
creators, however, as retaining the text of Shakespeare's play without appreciating (and appropriately
transforming) its dependence on Shakespeare's stage.
In both films the storm is depicted illusionistically, an inevitability, given cinematic expectations of
realism. We hear the rumble and crash of thunder, the noise of wind and rain; we see gloom crossed
with periodic flashes of lightning, the rain beating down--in the Elliott film, 900 gallons of water were
used37--and wet skin and beards, dripping water, mud. Neither director gives us the sound of the
storm at the particular moments indicated by the Folio. In Miller's film it is first heard faintly just before
Lear's last line in 2.4, "Oh fool, I shall go mad!" (288). Only after Lear leaves, with Cornwall's "Let us
withdraw, t'will be a storm" (289), does it sound loudly. It continues through the next scenes, even
those indoors, the backdrop for the unfolding action. In the Elliott film, the introduction of the storm, a
thunderous crash, follows Lear's cry that his revenges shall be "The terrors of the earth" (284)--a
timing close, but significantly different from that specified by the Folio. Whereas the Folio's placement
associates the storm with his daughters' cruelty, the storm at that moment in the Elliott film becomes
Lear's creation, an image of his anger. Even that particular identity, however, is subsumed into the
illusion of a real storm. "For technical verisimilitude to real-life storm," Steven Urkowitz complains
about the Elliott film, "we pay the price of understanding what Lear says."38
In neither film does the storm prompt or interrupt. Characters do not pause when it sounds. For the
storm is not a presence to which to respond, but the context for the scenes. Rather than
commanding, it envelops, infusing the scenes with pathos. It points up Tom o'Bedlam's
wretchedness, the Fool's vulnerability, Kent's anxiety, Lear's agony. The storm, moreover, is not
anchored spatially, so the movement of characters has no significance in delineating its meaning for
them. Indeed, it is the absence of the blocking that I envision on Shakespeare's stage that most
obviously undermines the storm sequence in the two films.
The Elliott film is informed by a clear interpretation of the play: the king is an elegant partriarchal
figure who suffers and then regains his power. He is heroically purified by his suffering, but--I agree
with H. R. Coursen39 in this--is not humbled or significantly changed. His psyche and feelings are
magnificently important. A key to the film's vision is the preponderance of close-ups of Lear. Closeups also have the effect of extrapolating Lear from a social and a physical context. Olivier "insisted
that inner feelings not be reduced to the level of domestic conversations," says Marion Perret in her
summary of the comments made by Elliott and the set designer Roy Stonehouse following the New
York City preview of the film.40 The movement of characters relative to each other and to the stage
structure, which on Shakespeare's stage externalizes the crisis of the storm for the characters, is
absent in Elliott's film.
Although as the characters enter at the beginning of 3.4 we see briefly the edge of a shadowy
structure, nothing of the hovel is visible when Kent states, "Here is the place (1)," and when three
times, in lines 1-5, he says, "enter." And when Lear says to the Fool, "In, boy; go first" (26), we do not
see the Fool leave. The camera is focused on Lear. His "Nay, get thee in" (27), a moment later,
sounds like "leave me alone." He rejects Kent's outstretched hands, but rather than suggesting
independent movement, the gesture is perfunctory. In contrast to Kent and the Fool on
Shakespeare's stage, where their proximity to the hovel door--physically and metaphorically the way
out of the storm--sets up an opposition to Lear, the two characters in Elliott's film simply encourage
our focus on Lear's pain. We see them framing Lear, watching him, supporting him. The film gives us
a succession of images of Lear's suffering. His meditative prayer "Poor naked wretches" (28) seems
without preparation, a moment in a series rather than the culminating beat of the sequence
constituting the first part of the scene.
Through much of the Lear-Edgar interchange, in the second part of the scene, we see either Lear or
Edgar, not both; when Lear asks, "Is man no more than this?" (105), Edgar is not in the camera
frame. Indeed, only once during that speech do we see Edgar. As a result, Lear's identification with
Tom o'Bedlam is much less clear than in the play as I have visualized it on Shakespeare's stage. In
the film when Lear tears off his clothes, Edgar is outside our focus, outside our concern, and the
result, for me, is confusion about dramatic movement.
In the last part of the scene, not only Lear's internal development but also the external plot is unclear.
Gloucester enters to "bring" Lear to "where both food and fire is ready" (157), but at the end of the
scene Gloucester does not bring Lear anywhere, for we do not see the five characters exiting toward
his cottage. Rather, they go into the hovel. The next time we see them (3.6), according to
Shakespeare's text, we are in Gloucester's cottage, but the beginning of the scene in the film reads
like a continuation of the entrance into the hovel that ended 3.4. Gloucester thrusts the torch he was
carrying in that earlier scene into a post hole and declares, "Here is better than the open air" (3.6.1).
Near the end of 3.4, his resigned hand gesture accompanying his line "No words, no words: hush"
(185) perhaps suggests to the highly attentive viewer that grudgingly he is accepting the hovel as
Lear's shelter--if so, the film is changing the plot--but that conclusion weakens Gloucester at a time
when he would seem to be growing in courage and produces an anticlimactic conclusion to the
scene.
Hardy Cook contrasts the depth-in-field technique with which Miller creates his film to the cinematic
montage technique of the Elliott film. "Elliott uses a highly fluid camera," says Cook; "Miller's camera
is largely static--he moves his actors within the frame; therefore, blocking is extremely important to
him. Concerning framing, Elliott uses tightly framed one-shots; Miller uses looser, generally medium,
ensemble shots."41 Miller's technique, like Elliott's, is connected to the concept informing his film:
King Lear as a family drama. "This production," says Coursen, "dismisses whatever cosmic issues
there may be in Lear and closes in on the family."42 The depth-in-field technique is instrumental in
creating a focus on groups of characters rather than on Lear alone. Again, I would argue, however,
that the storm sequence has no clear dramatic form.
We rarely see people exiting and entering a setting; characters simply move in and out of the frame.
An image of Lear's face and one of an object bobbing behind him begin 3.2. Not for several lines do
we see enough of the Fool to realize that the latter was his hat. The small frame gives us no feeling
of Lear and the Fool alone in a vast space and frequently obscures interactions. Lear's line "Come
on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?" (3.2.68) is said presumably to the Fool, but we do not see
him. It is again 3.4, however, that for me is the most compromised scene. The constricted frame
makes even small movements confusing. Lear's kneeling when he begins his prayer "Poor naked
wretches" (28) is visualized by his head dropping in the frame. It is only with a knowledge of the text
that one realizes he has kneeled. In the second part of the scene Edgar and Lear share the frame
through most, although not all, of their interchange, and Lear's bond with Edgar is thus much clearer
than in Elliott's film. But there is so little of Lear's figure in the camera's frame, and the other
characters stand so close to him that his unbuttoning seems a slight moment of confusion, subdued
by those around him before it is fully articulated--a moment easily missed by the viewer. In the final
part of the scene not only is there no sense of two possible exits, but essential lines relating to the
pull of those exits are spoken at the same time, contributing unintelligibility, rather than articulating
dramatic tension. We see a mass of people struggling with each other; why they are doing so is not
clear. It is not even obvious that they go out the same way, since we do not see them exit. Lear is not
in the frame with Edgar when Edgar delivers the scene's last lines. The scene is not an unfolding
drama, but rather a series of images of an agonized, intertwined group of people.
Peter Brook in his 1971 film of King Lear, starring Paul Scofield, and Grogori Kozintsev in his 1970
production, starring Yuri Yarvet, have created storm sequences that are quite different from those of
Elliott and Miller. Both Brook and Kozintsev render the storm illusionistically and neither draws on the
blocking I envision on Shakespeare's stage to structure our experience of it. Also, like the Miller and
Elliott productions, neither the Brook nor the Kozintsev film distinguishes clearly between the hovel
and the cottage. Indeed, Kozintsev conflates the two. But in contrast to Miller and Elliott, the other
two filmmakers significantly reconceive the storm sequence.
In Brook's film, settings and movements are ambiguous. In the scene correlating to 3.2, Lear moves
with the Fool and Kent toward the hovel, but when we next see them, we have no clear image of the
structure. Lear is obviously outside in the rain, but when he turns and sees Tom o'Bedlam, the
madman would seem to be inside, leaning across a beam, and now no rain falls on Lear. We do not
see Tom o'Bedlam leave the shelter, but when he delivers his mad speeches, the rain beating on him
clearly places him outside, as it does when the close-up camera pans slowly down his naked,
shivering body, and Lear asks, "Is man no more than this?" (105). When Lear begins to unrobe, there
is some movement, Lear pushing the others away, but the spatial relationship of characters is not
spelled out. The camera does show us Gloucester coming through the storm--he entreats Lear to go
with him to a cottage and Kent encourages him to take the offer--but we do not see the group leave
together or enter a cottage. The speech concluding the scene, "Child Rowland to the dark tower
came," is delivered in darkness until the last line and a half when we catch a brief glimpse of Tom
o'Bedlam, but no rain. Only if we superimpose the play script on the film does the scene correspond
to Jack J. Jorgens's film synopsis, "Lear brings his Fool and philosopher to Gloucester's hovel."43 We
do not see Lear bringing anyone anywhere.
The lack of clarity in placement and movement, however, is part of the disorientation that creates the
film's vision of the storm. The sequence is not realistically presented, and the distinction between
what is inside and outside Lear's mind is not always apparent. Lear prays for "Poor naked wretches"
(28) in silence, in an overvoice, with the sound of the storm suspended. During Tom o'Bedlam's
ravings the storm noises are distorted and manipulated. As Barbara Hodgson describes the scene,
"The fragmentation of the discourse so limits and denies interpretation by wresting all vision to Lear's
perspective that seeing, understanding, and knowing remain problematic." 44
The cottage scene begins with brief flashes of light and disjointed lines spoken by someone
unidentified, but with Kent's "How do you, sir?" (34) we are suddenly anchored in a space inside a
humble cottage. We see Lear's visions of his daughters as he puts them on trial, but we do not
participate in his hallucinations. The camera's presentation of an understandable space is essential
for the film's movement to a more objective perspective on Lear.
For Shakespeare, the audience's experience of the storm depends on a clearly defined playing area,
since that experience is in part created by the tension on stage between the desire to exit and that to
embrace the stage space. In contrast, Brook in the heath scenes confuses placement and movement
to thrust us into Lear's subjective experience of the storm.
Kozintsev in his film combines the storm scenes and the cottage scene. Lear runs across the stormy
landscape, crying out to the storm, and is found by Kent, who brings him to a structure in which the
outcasts of society have taken shelter. Tom o'Bedlam is one of them. It is in "the confined space of
the hovel," "within the context of real human beings with real material needs," says Lorne M.
Buchman, that Lear delivers his prayer of discovery:45 "How shall your houseless heads and unfed
sides, / ... defend you / From seasons such as these?" (3.4.30-32). The scene moves to Lear's "trial"
of his three daughters, with the beggars acting as jurors, and concludes, as does Shakespeare's 3.6,
with Gloucester's warning Kent that Lear is in danger. Kozintsev has structured a clear dramatic
movement: Lear's experience of the raging storm is preparation for his new understanding about
humanity and his final mental and emotional breakdown.
Brook's and Kozintsev's conceptions of the storm sequence seem inseparable from their use of the
cinematic rather than the theatrical medium. In contrast, Miller and Elliott do not, I feel, give the
language of the play a new context, a new kind of space. My charge that the Elliott and Miller films
are comparative failures, however, is not simply based on the fact that those films reference the
theater text to a much greater extent. Peter Hall's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Trevor Nunn's
Twelfth Night are provocative (and, I feel, moving) experiments in drawing on theatrical as well as
cinematic expectations. The storm scenes in Miller's and Elliott's films, however, seem to me to
exemplify the mistake of trying to capture what is essential to a theater experience of Shakespeare's
play while ignoring the significance of his stage and staging. If one is intent on experiencing
Shakespeare's text, I suggest that it is important to try to understand the stage embedded in it. That
can clarify and enrich the perception of his plays, and thus is a valuable first step in creating a vital
contemporary reading or, to return to Brook's works, in discovering the "form" that the "event" of
putting on a play or making a film gives "birth to."
Notes
1. Peter Brook, The Open Door: Thoughts on Acting and Theatre (New York: Theater
Communications Group, 1995) 60-61.
2. Brook 63.
3. Brook 122.
4. Bernard Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe: 1599-1606 (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1962) 8.
5. Beckerman 218.
6. Beckerman 7.
7. Arnold Kettle, "The Humanities of King Lear," in New Casebooks: King Lear, ed. Kiernan Ryan
(New York: St. Martins, 1992) 22.
8. The following mention the scenes only in passing: Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe; Jean E.
Howard, Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (Urbana: U
of Illinois P, 1984); T. J. King, Shakespearean Staging, 1599-1642 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971);
Peter Thomson, Shakespeare's Theatre (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). J. L. Styan, in
Shakespeare's Stagecraft (London: Cambridge UP, 1967), goes the furthest in discussing the
scenes, although not the element of the storm, on Shakespeare's stage.
9. Quotations follow the Arden edition of King Lear, edited by Kenneth Muir (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1959). References to plays are to lines unless otherwise noted.
10. One suggestion of the use of rain appears in the stage directions to Thomas Heywood's The
Bronze Age (Dramatic Works, 6 vols. [London: J. Pearson, 1874] 183), produced at the Red Bull:
Hercules "kils Busyris and sacrificeth him upon the Altar, at which there fals a shower of raine." Not
all the spectacle described in Heywood's Ages plays, however, were necessarily produced on the
stage, and, making this passage even less evidence for actual rain in Lear, see note 15 for scholars
who have mentioned the lesser use of spectacle at the Globe than the Red Bull.
11. Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1927) 18-20.
12. The Birth of Hercules, Malone Society Reprints (London: Oxford UP, 1910) 83.
13. The Birth of Hercules, 83.
14. See E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923) 1: 123, 139; 2:
74, 455; 3: 109, 110; 4: 73, 88, 121, 122, 127.
15. See Chambers, 3: 108; Andrew Gurr The Shakespearean Stage: 1574-1642 (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1970) 122.
16. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Northrop Frye, Pelican Shakespeare (Baltimore:
Penguin, 1970).
17. Jonathan Goldberg, "Perspectives: Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation," in New
Casebooks: King Lear, ed. Kiernan Ryan (New York: St. Martin's, 1992) 150.
18. Goldberg 151.
19. Goldberg 150.
20. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: I Thinking (New York: Harcourt, 1978) 106-07.
21. Arendt 107.
22. Arendt 106.
23. George Peele, The Battle of Alcazar in The Dramatic Works, vol. 3, ed. John Yoklavich (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1961).
24. Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear (Berkeley: U of California P, 1972) 184.
25. Editors have been far from uniform in their placement of the first sound of the storm. Kenneth
Muir in the Arden edition follows the Folio's placement: see Charlton Hinman's Norton Facsimile of
The First Folio of Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 1968) 803. In contrast, George Lyman Kittredge,
in his The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Boston: Ginn, 1936), places it after "O fool, I shall go
mad!" (289); G. Blackmore Evans, in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton, 1974), places it
after "but this heart" (284); and Russell Fraser, in the Signet Classic edition (New York: NAL, 1963),
places it after "No, I'll not weep" (282), as does Alfred Harbage (278) in the Pelican edition
(Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin, 1970). My assumption is that the importance of the Folio placement has
not been appreciated.
26. I am following J. L. Styan, Shakespeare's Stagecraft (214), in seeing the scene as divided into
three movements.
27. Styan is not concerned with the particular dynamics of the stage that I am proposing. He focuses
on Lear's movement to "the edge of the platform," where "he stands solitary to accost the storm" (99),
a position "marking the isolation of the martyr" (100). The scene for him is "constructed, not of
narrative incident, but of symbolic incident designed to make three progressive advances into ... [a]
world of fantasy" (214).
28. Frances Teague, "Sight and Perception in King Lear: An Approach through Imagery and Theme,"
in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's King Lear, ed. Robert H. Ray (New York: MLA, 1986) 84.
29. It is named only once, when Kent speaks of it as "th' house" (3.4.147).
30. Leah Marcus, "Retrospective: King Lear on St. Stephen's Night, 1606," in New Casebooks: King
Lear, ed. Kiernan Ryan (New York: St. Martins, 1992) 121, 122. Miranda Johnson-Haddad, in "The
Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger, 1990-91," Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991), also uses the word
"hovel" to refer to the setting of 3.6 (483).
31. Ian Pollock, Ian Pollock's Illustrated King Lear (New York: Workman, 1984) 81.
32. Patricia E. Tatspaugh, review of the Old Vic Theater's King Lear (London, 1989), Shakespeare
Bulletin 7 (September/October 1989): 12. "During much of the storm," she writes, the Fool "cannot be
seen, and his final gesture--he reaches out to touch Lear, who is being carried out of the hovel--is
barely visible. The Fool remains in the dark hovel with the several shrouded vagrants whose rest has
been disturbed" (12).
33. Russell Jackson speaks of "Gloucester's hovel" in Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 199394," Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 337.
34. Rosette C. Lamont, "Politicizing the Bard: Two European Productions of Shakespeare," thesis,
Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York, Spring 1991, 26.
35. George L. Geckle, review of the Royal Shakespeare Company's King Lear, Stratford-upon-Avon
(Winter 1993-94), Shakespeare Bulletin 12 (Winter 1994): 11.
36. For more examples of 3.2 being called "the storm scene," see Gerald Berkowitz, review of
Talawa Theatre Company's King Lear (London, 1994), Shakespeare Bulletin 12 (Summer 1994): 32;
Dorothy Cook and Wayne Cook, review of American Repertory Theater's King Lear (Cambridge, MA,
1991), Shakespeare Bulletin 9 (Summer 1991): 32; Maureen McFeeley, review of Arden Party's King
Lear (New York, 1994), Shakespeare Bulletin 12 (Fall 1994): 13.
37. R. Alan Kimbrough, "Olivier's Lear and the Limits of Video," Shakespeare on Film Newsletter 11
(December 1986): 6.
38. Steven Urkowitz, "Lord Olivier's King Lear," Shakespeare on Film Newsletter 8 (December 1983):
3.
39. H. R. Coursen, Shakespearean Performance as Interpretation (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1992)
138.
40. Marion Perret, "The Making of King Lear, Shakespeare on Film Newsletter 8 (April 1984): 1.
41. Hardy Cook, "Two Lears for Television: An Exploration of Televisual Strategies," Literature / Film
Quarterly 14 (1986): 182.
42. Coursen 137.
43. Jack J. Jorgens, Shakespeare on Film (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977) 307.
44. Barbara Hodgson, "Two King Lears: Uncovering the Filmtext," Literature / Film Quarterly 11
(1983): 147.
45. Lorne M. Buchman, Still in Movement: Shakespeare on Screen (New York: Oxford UP, 1991) 56.
Source Citation
Viguers, Susan. "The Storm in King Lear." CLA Journal 43.3 (Mar. 2000): 338-366. Rpt. in
Shakespearean Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 83. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Literature Resource
Center. Web. 22 May 2011.
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