King Lear opens with Lear disowning his favorite daughter for her honesty and rewarding the empty flattery of her older sisters. Lear also rejects Kent, a loyal man who seeks to help Lear realize his error. Shakespeare examined the problems of valuing the appearance of the virtues and morality in many of his plays. Angelo in Measure for Measure and Macbeth are examples of powerful men who display the appearance of virtue but are secretly great criminals. Lear goes mad rather than face the truth that his daughters’ protestation of love was only empty flattery. Lear as a king holds the appearance of virtue but acts in a manner that directly opposes morality. It is only when he ventures into the heath with the Fool and Kent and is faced with the storm that he begins to understand the world as it really is. The irony is that the play’s most moral men all end up on the run in the heath. Each holds an appearance that is at odds with their character. They hold the likeness of the mad and the poor while the wicked live in opulence.
All posts by Douglas H Campbell
The visual elements of Midsummer.
The tone and feeling of the play are heavily affected by the visual representations of the characters in Midsummer Night’s Dream. In particular the depiction of the character Bottom is a very important element of each performance. Looking at different pictures online show various representations of the character. Even with the same dialogue these visual depictions and the way the actor performs will create drastically different experiences.
Professor Berggren mentioned the portrayal where Bottom is shown with a tremendous phallus. How different is Bottom’s dialogue when given with the distraction of a giant waggling penis rather than just the implication of one? This is part of the magic of the theater in that each run of a play can be an entirely new experience. Each of the major characters in the play have the potential to present themselves entirely differently depending on the visual design in a way no regular reading can depict. Does anyone have one version they consider more valid than others? Any more thoughts on the visual experience of theater?
- Too normal?
