A Candle of Darkness: Multiplied Deixis in Roberto Ciulli’s King Lear

Spring 2008 83 A Candle of Darkness: Multiplied Deixis in Roberto Ciulli’s King Lear Jerzy Limon When in Act V, scene 2, of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Earl of Gloucester, blinded, resigned, and no longer desiring to flee any further, declares, “No further, sir; a man may rot even here,” his son Edgar encourages him to save himself: What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure Their going hence even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all. Come on. Gloucester’s reaction to this is somewhat surprising, for he says (in the Folio version): “And that’s true too.” As Bernard McElroy long ago observed,1 if he had said simply, “That’s true,” or “That’s not true,” there would be nothing unusual in this utterance; but he says “and that’s true too.” In other words, he equates two mutually exclusive options. It is impossible both to “rot even here,” and also, in the awareness that the time has not yet come, to face “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” It is, I suppose, not without significance that the words “and that’s true too” are the last that Gloucester utters in the play. (The Fool, in turn, will say, equally paradoxically, as he departs from the text, that he will “go to bed at noon.”)2 In Roberto Ciulli’s recent production of King Lear (seen at the XI International Shakespeare Festival in Gdańsk, Teatr Wybrzeże, August 2007), the ambiguities of language are deepened by the fact that each of the actors performing on stage impersonates at least two distinct fictional figures.3 One of these figures is not Shakespearean at all, and for that reason, and also because only Shakespeare’s text is used throughout, what is true for one of the figures in its specific context is Jerzy Limon is Professor of English at the English Institute, University of Gdańsk, Poland. His main area of research includes history of English drama and theatre in the 16th and 17th centuries. His publications in English include Gentlemen of a Company, Dangerous Matter, and The Masque of Stuart Culture. He is now preparing a book on theory for an American publisher, and a historical work connected with King James I’s secret service. Limon has also published four novels and translations of plays by William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Philip Massinger and Tom Stoppard. He runs a theatre project in Gdańsk, which aims at reconstructing an Elizabethan-style theatre, and organizes an annual International Shakespeare Festival. 84 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism not necessarily true for the other. Moreover, whatever the situation might be, the relevance of Shakespeare’s language to one of the figures may always be related to the implied relevance of the same utterance to the other figure, by which the network of possible relationships is deepened and becomes multi-layered. This means that all the verbal utterances, constituting what I prefer to call stage speech rather than language, appear simultaneously in distinct contexts, by which they generate different meanings, depending on their relationship to one of the two fictional speakers (played, as I said, by one actor) and their deictic axis.4 In theatre, meaning derives from the relationship of the denoted attributes5 of the fictional realm to the material substance (and its modeling) of scenic signs. Since in this particular production we have two distinct layers of fiction (for the sake of clarity, I shall mark them simply 1 and 2), the relationship becomes more complex and depends also on the cognitive choices made by the spectator. Thus the meaning of stage speech may be drawn from the relationship of the referential world, as created verbally by live actors, to one or the other of the two fictional figures to whom a given speech is attributed. The described situation, rather rare in theatre, relies on the actor’s ability to create more than one assumed deixis of fictional figures.6 Naturally, this needs further explanation. In Ciulli’s King Lear all the actors are blind, from the very start of the performance. More precisely: through the acting technique adopted, they indicate that they...