Tag: Shakespeare

We’re now exploring Act 5, and one of the characters we’ve looked at recently is Albany. He’s a character I find interesting, because of the way he grows in stature during the play, and he’s also a useful character to use as the basis for an exploration of how the OpenSourceShakespeare website can be used to develop students’ understanding.

If you’ve never used OpenSourceShakespeare before, it’s brilliant. You can search Shakespeare’s whole canon for individual words – there are 307 references to horses in Shakespeare’s works, but no donkeys – or use the Advanced Search to look for particular words in one play. Thus you can find out that the word ‘nothing’ appears 34 times in King Lear, and that Lear himself uses it more than anyone else, 10 times in total. You can also search for all the speeches by a particular character, and that’s really useful if you want a quick way of looking at something like how a character’s lines are distributed throughout the play, or how many soliloquies are spoken by a particular character. It enables you to check hunches. You can even come up with some surprising observations, such as the fact that Goneril and Edmund only actually speak to each other in one scene, Act 4 Scene 2, where Edmund declares himself ‘Yours in the ranks of death’. Give it a go! But be prepared to waste hours of your time.

So, Albany. He’s a bit of an odd character, isn’t he? If you do an image search for ‘King Lear Albany’, you’ll get a real mess of characters, but none of them recognisably Albany. Nobody gets famous for playing Albany, in the way they get famous for playing Gloucester or Edmund or even the vile eye-gouging Cornwall. I doubt Albany’s a role that actors aspire to play. What does Albany actually do? For the first half of the play, he’s barely there, such an unsubstantial presence that it’s not surprising that Goneril treats him with such contempt. But he’s one of only three characters to survive at the end of the play, and in one version – the 1608 quarto – he speaks the final lines. How does he get there?

We first meet Albany in Act One Scene One, where he is mentioned in the very first line, ‘I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.’ James Shapiro points out that this line would have had a deeply contemporary resonance for Shakespeare’s audience: King James’s older son, Henry, was the current Duke of Cornwall, and his younger son, Charles, was Duke of Albany. But there’s no clear reason for Lear to favour Albany, whose role in this scene is essentially to be his wife’s silent partner. In production, he’s often presented as nervous, on edge. Richard Clothier, in Sam Mendes’ 2014 production for the National Theatre, plays him as hesitant and solicitous, gazing up at Goneril as she delivers her speech to Lear. Albany only speaks twelve lines altogether in Act 1, and none of his speeches is longer than two lines. His first two lines are ‘Dear sir, forbear!’ and ‘Pray, sir, be patient’, urging Lear to think more carefully as he denounces first Cordelia and then Goneril. In general, in this first act, he’s a bit bewildered, constantly wanting to know what’s happening and what’s wrong. He wants people to calm down and not get quite so worked up. It’s quite telling, I think, that he makes no comment whatsoever about Lear’s riotous knights. You’d think he’d be a bit hacked off.

It’s even more striking that Albany doesn’t appear at all during Acts 2 and 3. He is entirely absent from the scenes of conflict at Gloucester’s castle, including Act 2 Scene 4, when Goneril and Regan carry out their callous reduction of Lear’s right to his hundred knights, and when Cornwall – who has already put the disguised Kent in the stocks – insists on barring the gates of the castle, shutting Lear out in the storm. He doesn’t appear again, in fact, until Act 4 Scene 2, but when he does return, it’s with a line that is one of my favourite insults in the whole world:

O Goneril,
You are not worth the dust which the rude wind
Blows in your face.

Isn’t it brilliant? And he continues in the same vein. He might have been absent, but he knows exactly what’s been going on. There are two emotions that dominate his lines: contempt, and an appalled, visceral horror:

Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile;
Filths savour but themselves. What have you done?
Tigers, not daughters, what have you perform’d?

Goneril, now, is ‘most barbarous, most degenerate’, a ‘devil’, a ‘fiend’. Her actions against her father are such that if the heavens do not rain down punishment upon her, then there is surely no hope:

Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
Like monsters of the deep.

Goneril dismisses him as a ‘milk-liver’d man’, a ‘vain fool’, but by now, we’re firmly on Albany’s side. And when a gentleman arrives with the news of Cornwall’s death, Albany himself takes heart that the heavens are on his side too: ‘This shows that you are above, / You justicers.’

In Act 5, we see Albany increasingly acting like a statesman, rather than shuffling his feet on the sidelines. You can get students to track this as they read the play, but it’s interesting to get them to confirm it by looking at Albany’s lines on OpenSourceShakespeare. He is respectful, but assertive. He arrests Edmund on a charge of capital treason, orders the sick Regan to be taken to his tent, and takes charge when Edgar, in disguise, presents himself to challenge his brother. His scorn for Goneril continues to be abundantly clear: her refers to her as a ‘gilded serpent’, and orders her to ‘shut [her] mouth’. As the play reaches its end, he vows to resign his powers to Lear ‘during the life of this old Majesty’, ensuring that the frail and grief-stricken king receives a measure of the dignity to which he is entitled.

Then there are those last lines, speaking of sadness, honesty, and lessons hard learned. In the Quarto version, they’re spoken by Albany. In the Folio, they’re spoken by Edgar. Arguably, it’s more appropriate to give them to Albany, as the highest-ranking survivor. He’s grown enormously during the course of the play. Would we ever have expected it, from his behaviour in Act 1? Probably not.

An interesting observation. Apart from Act 1 Scene 1, Albany and Cornwall are never on stage together. Have they ever got along, these sons-in-law? Some productions cast actors who differ markedly in appearance and physique, playing on the difference between the characters. In the 2014 National Theatre production, Albany is neat and grey-suited, Cornwall broad-shouldered in a maroon shirt and flashy striped tie. You can imagine them at an awkward family party, Cornwall insisting on taking over the barbecue, Albany sipping wine and wanting to make an early getaway.

And an enormous irony. The real-life Duke of Albany, just six years old when King Lear was first performed, would later become Charles I. We’ll never know what he was doing on Boxing Day 1606, when his dramatic equivalent was finding his feet, standing up to his wife, and witnessing the death of his king. I’m imagining him watching through the banisters, wondering what was going on, with no idea of what the future had in store.

Storms, eh? There’s been enough of them around recently, what with Arwen and Barra. We’ve reached the storm scenes in King Lear, and have spent a lot of time unpicking what the storm represents. And this storm certainly does a lot of symbolic work. It’s an external manifestation of Lear’s inner turmoil. It represents the divisions within the kingdom, both political – in terms of the growing division between Albany and Cornwall – and social, in the plight of the ‘poor naked wretches’ whose situation Lear has done far too little to alleviate. It’s also a huge, drenching, violent force, a ‘dreadful pudder’, a sign of how powerful the natural world can be. In Shakespeare’s plays, storms – like the one that blows down the chimneys on the night of Duncan’s murder in Macbeth – function as signs of a heavenly displeasure with events on earth, an indication that the balance of things has been disturbed and needs to be restored. Lear wants the storm to make the wretches tremble, for those whose crimes have so far gone unwhipped to be found out and punished. Hmm. Thoughts, anyone?

The storm scenes should be incredibly powerful to teach, but their force depends so much on the careful groundwork you’ll have been doing in your work on the play so far. Students need to understand what is going on in Lear’s mind, the combination of rage and guilt and pain and self-pity. They need to grasp the symbolic contrast between Lear at the beginning of the play, in his position of power and luxury, and Lear on the heath, the gates of Gloucester’s castle barred against him. As I said in my previous post, this contrast helps to mark out Lear’s peripeteia, the downward spiral that was set in motion at the beginning of the play. Crucially, they also need a sense of why it is that Lear addresses the storm in the way he does. At the beginning of Act 3 Scene 2, Lear dares the storm to do its worst, to shake the earth to its foundations and ‘strike flat the thick rotundity o’th’world.’ Students benefit from a visual representation of the violence of these words: I get them to imagine a ball of Play-Doh being squashed flat. Lear wants the storm to ‘crack Nature’s moulds’, break the patterns from which things are cast so they can be made anew. Depending on their own life experiences, some sixth formers will know what it is like to feel so desperate, at such a pitch, that you want to rage and howl and destroy. Others won’t. How can we help them to understand the overwhelming nature of Lear’s emotions, to inhabit them from inside?

There’s a lot of discussion at the moment about knowledge in English, and the complex forms that this knowledge takes. Perhaps uniquely among subjects, learning in English depends on a complicated set of interactions between the teacher, the students, the text being taught, and the wider context within which this teaching takes place. Anyone who has taught English for more than a few years will recognise that you never teach the same text twice: students will bring different experiences to the text, come up with different interpretations, and interact with it in different ways. English is a profoundly generative subject in which learners construct meaning actively, drawing on their existing knowledge, understanding and experiences in order to make sense of what they read. These debates about knowledge in English have been reignited recently in response to discussions about the role of direct instruction, scripted lessons and mastery learning, but really they are nothing new. Paulo Freire’s 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed outlined the difference between the ‘banking model’ of education, which treats learners as empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge that other people have deemed important and appropriate, and a dialogical approach that encourages the development of a critical consciousness. And while the 1989 National Curriculum probably does not loom large in people’s minds as a force for student empowerment, its main author Brian Cox – not the actor, nor the particle physicist, but the literary critic – argued that the curriculum should aim to make students ‘active makers of meaning’ rather than passive receivers.

These constructivist approaches to English – in which meanings are generated anew every time the text is taught, and in which new interpretations sometimes emerge between different encounters with the text – underpin good English teaching. They are, however, immensely demanding. We’ve probably all taught students who’d prefer to be told what to think, who’d be quite happy to be given a set of notes that they can learn off by heart and reproduce faithfully. And we’ve probably also taught students who do not yet have the emotional maturity to cope with certain aspects of the texts they are studying. Some texts require a lot from their readers. They want them to understand what it is to experience particular emotions. They need them to have a sense of what’s going on in the world, of different kinds of injustice and inequality. Such things can be taught about, but this kind of knowledge will remain awkward, like a pair of shoes worn on the wrong feet. You need to live inside it, to take hold of it, in order to make use of it.

King Lear, on the heath, is experiencing huge and violent emotions, and understanding these emotions – and how Shakespeare conveys them – takes careful handling. Let’s think about the situation Lear is in. He has lost just about everything – his daughters, his status, his knights, his dignity. He is in the process of losing his wits. He is starting to realise that he is not the king he thought he was. These feelings are huge and horrible and strike at the very core of his being. They are so painful that the storm, in comparison, is nothing. He wants it to do its worst, to pound and destroy and rinse everything clean. Students need to unpick all of this, and we need to know how to help them to do it.

One concept that helps to articulate what teachers of English Literature do in the classroom is that of pedagogic literary narration, a term coined by John Gordon. This refers, essentially, to the way teachers present and frame texts and shape their students’ encounters with them. In an article in Teaching English, Gordon describes the different forms that pedagogic literary narration can take, including checking comprehension during a reading of a text, choosing when to elicit students’ comments, making connections with prior reading, encouraging reflection and asking ‘big picture’ questions that point beyond individual texts and prompt wider thinking. Knowing how and when to make these interventions is an important part of an English teacher’s work, and as Gordon states, ‘It is important to acknowledge this dimension of subject expertise, to identify it and describe it. Doing so allows us to recognise expert practice, and can inform mentoring to guide new teachers of English rapidly towards these high-level skills’. I’d argue that there is also a strong emotional dimension to this process. Marcello Giovanelli and Megan Mansworth have written recently of the importance of emotion in the teaching of English, and nowhere is this more apparent than at those points in texts when characters are confronting experiences that students might find hard to understand.

These are big issues, not least because they might also touch on feelings that students might recognise all too well. We should never lose sight of our safeguarding role, and there are times when the texts we teach tread very close to experiences that might be extremely difficult. Anguish, rage, the nagging voice of conscience: all big feelings for Lesson 2 on a wet Tuesday morning in December. But this makes it all the more important that we understand what we do when we teach English Literature, and why it can never be reduced to the simple transmission of facts.

One thing that can often be difficult, if you’re studying a play as huge as King Lear, is to maintain a sense of the whole play in students’ minds. It can easily become atomised, chopped up: a scene here, a speech there, and the overall trajectory is lost. We reached the end of Act Two earlier this week, and I’ve been getting the students to revisit aspects of Lear’s tragic journey and looking at key overarching themes, so they don’t lose sight of the big picture.

Act Two Scene Four is a good place to pause and look back at the journey Lear is making, since it marks a number of significant changes since the beginning of the play. One of these is the final breakdown of his relationship with Goneril and Regan. In the love trial of Act One Scene One, both were very keen to profess their love for Lear, whose plan was to visit each of them for a month in turn, with his train of a hundred knights in tow. Later in Act One, Lear’s knights cause chaos in Goneril’s castle: when Goneril refuses to house more than fifty of his knights, Lear leaves in high dudgeon. By the end of Act Two, his daughters have questioned why he needs any knights to accompany him at all:

Goneril:
What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five,
To follow in a house where twice so many
Have a command to tend you?
Regan:
What need one?

It’s a clear demonstration, in numerical form, of how far Lear has fallen since the beginning of the play, when he stated his determination to retain ‘The name and all th’ addition to a king’. The fact that his daughters are prepared to work so closely together to deprive him of his knights is a devastating moment for Lear. They told him that they loved him, and he believed them. And now, they won’t let him have what he wants. His ‘O reason not the need!’ speech shows very clearly that need, in Lear’s eyes, is irrelevant: he might not need any of his knights, but he certainly wants them, to convince himself that he is still as important as he once was. From here, there really is no way that his relationship with Goneril and Regan can be salvaged. (And let’s face it, if your father cursed you with sterility and called you a boil and an embossed carbuncle, I think you could be forgiven for crossing him off your Christmas card list).

There’s also a neat physical opposition between the start of the play and the end of Act Two. In Act One Scene One, Lear’s first entrance is a ceremonial one. His arrival is heralded by a sennet, and he is accompanied by Cornwall, Albany, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia and his attendants. On stage, this entrance is often used to heighten the king’s status, as in the 2016 RSC production when Anthony Sher’s Lear was borne aloft in a glass box in a quasi-religious ceremony, or the 2018 National Theatre production when Ian McKellen’s Lear was surrounded by deferential guards and took up his place in front of a giant portrait of himself. But by the end of Act Two Scene Four, he has been very unceremoniously shut out of Gloucester’s castle. He exits, in a rage as high as the winds, and his daughters and Cornwall decide that the gates should be barred, on a wild night with no shelter for miles around. So, another demonstration of Lear’s peripeteia: his fall from ‘high estate’ to ‘low degree’ could not be illustrated more clearly.

The third change that I want to talk about is a more subtle one. It concerns the breakdown of Lear’s speech and his increasing lack of fluency – ‘the ‘glib and oily art’ that Cordelia refers to in Act One Scene One when taking leave of her sisters. At the beginning of the play, Lear dominated not just in his physical and symbolic presence, but in his language. His first speech is long, measured, and gives the impression of having been carefully planned. He also directs the speech of others. Notice his use of imperative verbs: ‘know’, ‘tell’, ‘speak first’, ‘speak’, ‘speak’, ‘speak again’, ‘mend your speech a little’. But as Lear’s mental state begins to deteriorate, so too does his command of language. Sentences trail off, exclamations and self-contradictions become more frequent, and the King is sometimes reduced to an incoherent splutter, as when Gloucester informs him that Regan and Cornwall are refusing to speak to him:

“Fiery”? The “fiery” duke? Tell the hot duke that—
No, but not yet. Maybe he is not well.

The addressees of Lear’s speech also change. Within just one speech, he can jump from addressing another character on stage to speaking to the gods, himself, a different character, and various abstract entities: it’s as if the contents of his mind are becoming increasingly and messily exposed to us. This is particularly apparent in his final speech in Act Two Scene Four. Look at how Lear’s argument about need breaks down as he reflects on his growing inability to regulate his emotions. He swerves from speaking to his daughters, to pleading with the heavens. He asks the gods to make him angry, rather than letting him cry. He goes back to speaking to his daughters – the ‘unnatural hags’ – and issues the most impotent of threats. I get my students to put these lines into their own words. I’m going to do something really awful to get my own back on you. I don’t know what it is that I’m going to do, but it’s going to be really, really bad. He pauses, mid-line. Is he out of breath, choking back tears, gathering himself? And then he tells the Fool, his trusted companion, that he shall go mad. (This in itself is a change from Act One Scene Five, when pleads with the heavens: ‘Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven, / Keep me in temper, I would not be mad!’ At that point, he was desperate to retain his sanity: by now, he senses that madness is increasingly inevitable.)

O reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need, –
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both!
If it be you that stir these daughters’ hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let not women’s weapons, water-drops,
Stain my man’s cheeks! No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both,
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; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I’ll weep. O fool! I shall go mad.

There are some further interesting discussions that you can have with students at this point. One is to use an analysis of Lear’s speech as a springboard to get students to think about each character’s relationship to language. Cordelia cannot ‘heave [her] heart into [her] mouth’; Goneril, Regan and Edmund use language to flatter, scheme and manipulate. Kent is known for his plainness of speech, and is put in the stocks for it. Edgar seems almost pitifully tongue-tied when he is on stage with Edmund. The Fool’s language is, of course, notoriously playful and slippery, but even he has to operate within certain limits, for fear of the whip. Another – at a point in the play where questions of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are particularly acute – is to get them to consider which characters are insiders, which are outsiders, and which have changed their status, physically or metaphorically, since the beginning of the play. Lear was the most important insider at the beginning, but now he’s on the outside. Goneril and Regan are on the inside, as is Cornwall: Albany has expressed his doubts about what Goneril is doing, but hasn’t yet made his allegiances completely clear. Cordelia, Kent and Edgar were insiders, but now they’re on the outside. And Edmund, of course, was very definitely on the outside, but is now inside, as a result of his ability to dissemble.

A couple of years ago, one of my students pointed out that the insiders in the play are all those who can manipulate language to secure their own interests. The outsiders can’t. We paused, and another student said, ‘That’s like life, really, isn’t it?’ Never say that Shakespeare isn’t relevant, and that his plays don’t still have things to tell us.

We’re nearly at the end of Act One of King Lear! There are lots of things I could blog about – Goneril and riotous knights and the concept of tragedy among them – but today I’m going to focus on Edmund.

Where do we start? Edmund is there right at the beginning of the play, in the conversation that takes place before the entrance of Lear and the spectacle of the love trial. His father, Gloucester, introduces him to Kent, and makes a crass remark about what ‘good sport’ there was ‘at his making’. He also informs Kent that Edmond is illegitimate, referring to him as a ‘whoreson’. Edmund, in response, says very little. It’s easy to skim over this brief conversation on the way to the main part of the action, but I’d argue that students need to go back to it, once they’ve studied Act 1 Scene 2, and imagine what Edmund is thinking while his father is engaging in tactless banter about his conception. How does he react? Is there an eye-roll, a grimace? Does he play along? Has he heard it all before?

If Edmund’s behaviour in Act 1 Scene 1 is somewhat inscrutable, Act 1 Scene 2 leaves us under no illusions whatsoever as to how he actually feels about his situation. His soliloquy at the beginning of Act 1 Scene 2 reveals him as charismatic, persuasive, and deeply resentful. Note that it’s the first soliloquy spoken in the whole play. I draw students’ attention to this, as it’s a good point to make about Shakespeare’s methods, and encourages them to think about dramatic method on a much broader level than the picky micro analysis that GCSE often seems to encourage. (I get them to think of Shakespeare as the puppeteer, pulling the strings: why does he make this character, whichever character it might be, do this at this particular point in the play?)

Soliloquies are a funny thing. They can be played simply as the revelation of a character’s thoughts, allowing the audience access to feelings and motivations that do not – for whatever reason – emerge in conversation. In this type of soliloquy, it’s as though we, as the audience, are not actually there: we’re simply witnessing the private unfolding of the workings of a character’s mind. A good example of this kind of soliloquy is Macbeth’s ‘Is this a dagger I see before me?’ in Act 2 Scene 1, immediately before the murder of Duncan. But some of Shakespeare’s soliloquies can equally be played as monologues, spoken directly to the audience. Edmund’s soliloquies fall into this category. Yes, he could be speaking just to himself, voicing the grudges that have been burning within him ever since he learned of his inferior status. However, I’d argue that his solo speeches are much more effective when used as a way of building a relationship with the audience, breaking the fourth wall and inviting us to share in the injustice of his situation. One excellent example of this is Paapa Essiedu’s performance for the 2016 RSC production, available on Digital Theatre: Essiedu’s facial expressions beckon the audience to join in with his disdain and present Edmund – after the mannered speeches of Gonerill and Regan – as perfectly plausible and sympathetic. Two very good short film examples are Daniel Schroeder’s and Riz Ahmed’s for the Guardian’s Shakespeare Solos series, both of which are delivered straight to camera. After all, to a 21^st century audience, Edmund’s objections to his treatment are perfectly reasonable. Why should he be branded with baseness, purely because of his illegitimacy?

There’s also the language that Edmund uses. I get students to count the number of questions in his first soliloquy. There are nine in the first fifteen lines: not only questioning, but almost hectoring. Who is he addressing? There’s Nature, first of all, who he addresses as ‘my goddess’, although note that he uses the familiar ‘thou’. There’s Edgar, who we have not yet seen, and who looms in Edmund’s mind as an object of hatred. And there are the gods, the object of Edmund’s final command: ‘Now, gods, stand up for bastards!’ (An interesting exercise you can get students to do is to look at how many times characters in King Lear try to command the gods, as opposed to making requests of them: they’ve not yet learned to ask politely.) Students can also examine the way Edmund plays around with the words that taunt him, spitting out the plosives in ‘bastardy’ and ‘base’ and holding the syllables of ‘legitimate’ up for inspection. Get them to experiment with different ways of emphasising these words, or demonstrate yourself.

I wanted to find out how many soliloquies Edmund actually speaks, so I consulted Open Source Shakespeare and did some counting. (Open Source Shakespeare is brilliant: I found out that the word ‘nothing’ appears more times in King Lear than in any other of Shakespeare’s plays, which is a useful thing for your students to know.) Edmund has more soliloquies than any other character in King Lear – six in total – and his soliloquies make up almost a quarter of his lines. After him, the character given the most opportunities of speaking to the audience is Edgar. An interesting point to note is that Lear – alone of the four great tragic protagonists – has no soliloquies at all, although there are some well-known study websites that claim he has a number of soliloquies, including his ‘O reason not the need!’ speech in Act 2 Scene 4 (spoken in front of both his daughters, Cornwall, Kent, the Fool, and various servants) and his apostrophising of the storm in Act 3 Scene 2 (spoken in front of the Fool). A useful point to make to your students: don’t trust everything you read online.

For a very different Edmund – Robert Lindsay, dripping with hatred – see the 1983 Granada TV production, about 20 minutes in. And see also my article for the British Library’s Discovering Literature series on Edmund, Goneril and Regan, which explores Edmund as an example of Machiavellian duplicity.  

We’re now three weeks into term, and my Year Twelves are up to Act 1 Scene 4 of King Lear. We haven’t met the Fool yet – he’s waiting until next lesson – but we’re thoroughly immersed, and I’m remembering what a fantastic play this is to teach.

Over the years I’ve witnessed lots of discussions about the teaching of Shakespeare: whether you approach a play through a cold read or a warm read, when to introduce contextual and critical reading, whether to watch a production of the whole play first and so on. My approach varies a little depending on the nature of the group I have in front of me, but I begin by scaffolding students’ reading very heavily. In a typical lesson, I’ll give them a brief overview of whichever scene we’re focusing on – not a plot summary, but a sense of its significance within the play and any major characters we meet. We’ll then read the scene out loud, sometimes splitting it into sections. At the start of the course I ask for volunteers to read, as the start of an A level course can be intimidating not just academically but also interpersonally, especially if you’ve come from a different school or if you’ve spent much of your school career in middle sets and have suddenly found yourself in a group with people who are much more able and confident than you. I don’t want to expose anyone. Once the students are more comfortable with each other, and once I’ve got to know them, I’ll start to allocate parts.

I know some people are sceptical about getting students to read Shakespeare out loud, with memories of stumbling over words and taking ages to get through the play. I think the stumbling is an important part of the learning process and use it as a way of exploring unfamiliar vocabulary. Lots of reassurance also helps to build a sense of your classroom as a safe space where struggling is accepted. I will intervene at points when we’re reading aloud to question and check understanding, drawing in especially those students who aren’t reading and anyone who I suspect might be struggling but not want to admit it. Yes, I could show a professional production of the play, but the exploratory talk is really valuable and part of helping the group to coalesce and learn to trust each other (and me) at this early stage.

Once we’ve finished a particular part of the scene, I’ll display a set of questions designed to make sure students’ understanding is secure and get them to make some observations about aspects of language, character and theme. At this stage, these are fairly simple: I emphasise that our study of the play will be an iterative process and that we’ll add layers of detail and complexity as we go along. Students discuss these questions in pairs or small groups and make notes. We then discuss as a whole class, and I’ll build in further layers of questioning to probe, secure, extend – whatever’s needed at this stage.

We encourage students to use the Cornell method of notemaking, but for our read-through of the play I’ve introduced a slightly modified version in which students split the main part of their page into two equal columns rather than having a narrower left-hand column. Their initial responses to questions go on the left, and then they use the right-hand column to add detail during our discussion. The section at the bottom of the page is used to summarise key points when they revisit their notes.

What about introducing productions? I do this in a number of ways: showing clips of different versions to highlight different interpretations, showing the play act by act so students can consolidate their understanding, and showing the whole play so they get a sense of the overall arc of the tragedy. We’ll go and see a production if one is accessible, but there are a number of fantastic films of stage productions available and these are really useful for focusing on particular scenes. I introduce these once we’ve read the love trial in Act 1 Scene 1. I want students to be able to grasp a number of things about this scene. One is its ceremonial nature. The lack of stage directions in Shakespeare’s plays means that students often skim over the stage directions that are there, but I think it’s really important that they look at the transition from the conversation between Kent, Gloucester and Edmond and the formal, orchestrated quality of the love trial. So we pick up on the sennet that heralds Lear’s entrance, the procession onto the stage of Lear, his daughters, Albany and Cornwall, and the attendants. Those attendants are another thing: we don’t know how many, or what they do, but I want students to think about how they could be used to draw attention to the formality of the scene. Another is the difference between Goneril and Regan: it’s easy to lump them in together, but I want students to be able to pick up on the subtle differences between them. And then there’s the way everything starts to disintegrate, once Cordelia refuses to play the part that Lear has given her. (Because we do Macbeth at GCSE, we draw parallels with the banquet, another scene that starts with a formal entrance and disintegrates into chaos.)

In order to explore these ideas further, I show them clips of two different productions. The first is the 2014 National Theatre production, directed by Sam Mendes, starring Simon Russell Beale as a pugnacious, dictatorial Lear. In this, Lear’s daughters sit at a long table, with Albany and Cornwall, in sombre business suits, beside their wives. Lear sits at a distance on a plain wooden throne, and gets up to pace around as his daughters deliver their speeches. Kate Fleetwood as Goneril is hesitant and careful with her words: Anna Maxwell Martin as Regan is a flirtatious daddy’s girl who gets up to sit on her father’s knee. The tension is heightened by Lear’s close scrutiny of his daughters, and his air of teetering already on the edge of irrationality: Michael Billington, in the Guardian, commented that ‘he has all the aspects of a Stalinesque tyrant and struts around with his massive head thrust forward as if about to devour anyone who crosses him’. There’s also the presence of those attendants, several rows of them in dark military uniforms, who encircle the group on stage. When Cordelia (Olivia Vinall) refuses to play along with her father’s wishes, the enraged Lear upturns the tables and sends his daughters shrinking in fear.

The second clip we watch is from Greg Doran’s 2016 RSC production with Anthony Sher as a very different Lear, dressed in furs and borne onstage by his attendants on a throne enclosed in a transparent case. Again, there’s a sense of distance, created this time by the fact that Lear sits on high, a huge gold disc in the background reflecting the play’s astrological theme. The performative nature of the love trial is emphasised by the fact that Nia Gwynne and Kelly Williams, as Goneril and Regan, speak to the assembled company, their backs to Lear, when delivering their speeches. Sher’s Lear is more godlike than Russell Beale’s, and raises his hand as if channelling some higher power when he banishes Mimi Ndiweni’s Cordelia. Those on stage bow or cower, terrified of what he might unleash.

What’s clear from both these productions is that the trial, of course, isn’t a trial at all. Lear has already decided how he will divide his kingdom, and who will get which portion. Students can see the tension on stage, the power imbalances at play, and recognise the coercive nature of this situation. It’s the perfect example of hubris, and from this point, they’re ready to see Lear’s tenuous grasp on sanity weaken further.

Busy times at work at the moment, but my next King Lear post will focus on the character of Edmond. The clip of Simon Russell Beale’s Lear is here; further clips and interviews are available here. An extract from Anthony Sher’s performance is here; the whole production is available on DVD and Blu-ray from the RSC and can also be streamed from Digital Theatre if you’ve got a subscription.

So. It’s the start of term, I’m back in my own classroom after a year of carting my stuff around six different teaching zones, and I have an A level English Literature group after two years of focusing on English Language. Teaching A level English Literature is – as you might expect – one of my favourite things about my job, and I’ll be starting the year with King Lear, which is just about my favourite text to teach. Wahey! So, as a new-school-year resolution, I’m going to try to blog my way through teaching King Lear, partly as a record of the whole unfolding teaching process, and partly to help anyone who’s teaching it for the first time and could do with a hand.

A word first about the start of the A level course. I know A level English Literature isn’t simply a list of set texts, and that the course should involve a wider exploration of what the study of literature actually involves. In the past, I’ve begun the course by getting students to think about what literature is, why we read the kinds of books we do, how our interpretations are shaped by our own particular contexts, and so on. But I was never convinced that the students were ready for that kind of philosophical reflection at that point in their A level experience. Students are often too nervous to open up in front of peers who they might have only just met, and they can get hung up on not wanting to say the wrong thing. A few years ago, I decided to go straight into the first set text, and start to feed in wider critical concepts once students had found their feet and relaxed a bit. It worked much more effectively, and I’ve never been tempted to go back.

We do the AQA B specification, and study Aspects of Tragedy and Elements of Political and Social Protest Writing, two big chunky genres that students enjoy. Most of our students have done Macbeth at GCSE, so should know something about tragedy already, and in many ways Macbeth is the perfect preparation for King Lear, raising similar questions about tragic protagonists and the errors that set their downfalls in motion, as well as the nature of kingship. But before we even start to think about tragedy, I put the students into groups, and give them a series of images to explore. I also give them a number of prompts:

• What clues do these images give you as to the play’s central characters and themes?
• What kinds of locations are featured?
• What kinds of emotions are conveyed?
• What do you notice about eyes?
• What do you notice about crowns?
• What do you notice about the number three?

The images I chose are all examples of art inspired by King Lear: theatrical posters, cover designs and illustrations. Pinterest is a great source of suitable images, and students can then, as a follow-up, be asked to find their own images and save them to a shared class Pinterest board. My King Lear Pinterest board is here, and you’ll also find some examples on Michele Walfred’s ‘King Lear Theatrical Posters’ website, which provides a fascinating commentary on some of these images. I chose these images to highlight particular aspects of the play and give students a context for their reading, but it’s important to note that the discussion generated also helps the students to get to know each other and establishes a culture in which they are allowed to be tentative and exploratory, sharing ideas and building on each other’s contributions.

Students then summarise the outcomes of their discussion. It’s interesting to see how much of the play’s plot and themes they can piece together. There are obvious points about tensions and rivalries within families, about the precariousness of the crown and the idea of division. Stefano Imbert’s poster for the Boomerang Theatre Company’s 2006 production depicts a man literally split into three, alone on a hilltop in a bleak landscape. Wieslaw Walkulski’s poster for the 1992 production of Król Lear at the Teatr Nowy in Poznan shows the king’s crown disintegrating and obscuring his vision. Istvan Orosz’s striking poster for the 1999 production of Lear Király at the Petrofi Theatre in Hungary, meanwhile, shows the crown entangled in the bare branches of the king’s mind. Other images – including Clare Van Vliet’s woodcut illustration for The Tragedie of King Lear and the stark poster produced for the Wharton Center’s 2011 production of the play – focus on the threat posed by the elements, while chess pieces and grasping hands also feature.

I then introduce some quotations from the play:

• Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.
• Come not between the dragon and his wrath!
• He hath ever but slenderly known himself.
• Now gods, stand up for bastards!
• The king falls from bias of nature, there’s father against child.
• Who is it that can tell me who I am?
• How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!
• Thou would’st make a good fool.
• I pray you, father, being weak, seem so.
• I prithee, daughter, do not make me mad.
• You heavens, give me patience, patience I need!
• I will do such things – what they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth.
• I am a man more sinned against than sinning.
• The younger rises as the old doth fall.
• Then let them anatomise Regan; see what breeds about her heart.
• The worst is not, so long as we can say ‘This is the worst’.
• As flies to wanton boys are we to th’gods; they kill us for their sport.
• ‘Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind.
• Through tattered clothes great vices do appear: robes and furred gowns hide all.
• You ever gentle gods, take my breath from me.
• I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
• O fool! I shall go mad.
• I am a very foolish, fond old man.
• The gods are just.
• The wheel has come full circle.
• Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?

Students are asked to look for further examples of the themes they’ve identified, and to make connections between quotations. Again, it’s surprising how far students can get in these initial explorations. This week, for instance, my new Year Twelves observed that a number of the quotations make requests of the gods – from Edmond’s ‘Now, gods, stand up for bastards!’ to Gloucester’s ‘You ever gentle gods, take my breath from me’. However, they also spotted that the gods do not necessarily assent to these requests: ‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to th’gods; They kill us for their sport’. They linked this quotation to the recurring images of chess pieces, and the idea that while characters might think they can command the gods, they learn eventually that they are little more than pawns in an indifferent universe.

That was a long way to go in just our first two lessons, accompanied by incredibly rich discussions. Students drew on their knowledge of other plays, and working in groups meant that they were able to build relationships with their new classmates, as well as giving me the chance to observe how they interacted and gauge how confident they were in handling Shakespeare’s language. Their homework for the next lesson was to research the features of tragedy, which is the kind of flipped learning we’ve been doing in English for years without making a fuss about it 🙂