Academics get very exercised about the variants between the Quarto and Folio texts of the play—the fact that Lear has different dying words in each version, that a different person inherits the gored state at the end of each version (Albany speaks the final lines in Quarto, Edgar in Folio), and so on. Did you concern yourself with these textual matters or do you feel that the director is free to pick and mix, cut and paste, his or her own version of the play?
Noble: I think the director is free to do what he wants to do, but he must also be answerable for what he does. I’ve never been very interested in the textual variations. What I did, particularly in the first production, was skin the last three hundred or four hundred lines—I was absolutely brutal with the cuts there. And the impact of it was that, at the very moment of repentance, it was too late. There was no time to save Lear and Cordelia’s lives, because the people on stage had been chatting, talking all the time. That was all very much to do with the fact that it was a godless universe. The truth is on both occasions I created a world that seemed to me to be logical from all the different versions. I would then be responsible for that and I would stand by that.
Nunn: I don’t think that in 1968 when I first directed the play anybody was yet saying, “The Quarto and the Folio are two quite different plays.” I remember at the time consulting John Barton and arriving at a “best of both worlds” conflated text. That text became the basis of the text I used in 1976 with Donald Sinden, but then when I started out this time with Ian McKellen I did read a number of scholars who were telling me that I should be making a choice between Quarto and Folio. Alas, I found myself unwilling to lose rich and evocative material from either version, and so I worked with a slightly different conflation, but a conflation nonetheless. For me, the more important change since I first directed the play is not in scholarship, but in the simple fact that I am thirty years older now. Shakespeare’s engagement with ultimate questions about mortality, what we construct for ourselves to explain or to accept our mortality, of course speaks more potently to me now. The play, as I have said, is very hard on organized human society and institutions of every kind. There is very little Lear and Gloucester have left to believe in, before they must endure their going hence. Edgar is left to conclude the play, and I think deliberately, it is a conclusion of a man who has nothing really to say. He offers no positive, no beliefs, no journey to a better future. He is by then almost the only character left standing, and in the bleakest of all Shakespeare’s endings, he seems to know that all we can determine on is to “endure.”
SHAKESPEARE’S CAREER
IN THE THEATER
BEGINNINGS
William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.
Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare’s childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a “star.” The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.
Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into tired repertory pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything that had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call “Marlowe’s mighty line” sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brotheclass="underline" Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy Titus Andronicus but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.
He also invented a new role for himself, that of in-house company dramatist. Where his peers and predecessors had to sell their plays to the theater managers on a poorly paid piecework basis, Shakespeare took a percentage of the box-office income. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men constituted themselves in 1594 as a joint stock company, with the profits being distributed among the core actors who had invested as sharers. Shakespeare acted himself—he appears in the cast lists of some of Ben Jonson’s plays as well as the list of actors’ names at the beginning of his own collected works—but his principal duty was to write two or three plays a year for the company. By holding shares, he was effectively earning himself a royalty on his work, something no author had ever done before in England. When the Lord Chamberlain’s Men collected their fee for performance at court in the Christmas season of 1594, three of them went along to the Treasurer of the Chamber: not just Richard Burbage the tragedian and Will Kempe the clown, but also Shakespeare the scriptwriter. That was something new.
The next four years were the golden period in Shakespeare’s career, though overshadowed by the death of his only son, Hamnet, age eleven, in 1596. In his early thirties and in full command of both his poetic and his theatrical medium, he perfected his art of comedy while also developing his tragic and historical writing in new ways. In 1598, Francis Meres, a Cambridge University graduate with his finger on the pulse of the London literary world, praised Shakespeare for his excellence across the genres: