Beyond Politics in Bond's Lear

Beyond Politics in Bond's Lear PERRY NODELMAN There are two easy assumptions to make about Edward Bond's Lear. The first is that the play parodies Shakespeare's King Lear. The second, encouraged by Bond's preface to the play, is that it makes a political statement. In fact, most readings of Lear assume that Bond makes the political statement by means of the Shakespearean parody. Some of Lear can indeed be explained this way. Lear's wall represents Shakespeare's idea of order. Shakespeare believed that monarchs had an obligation to keep order in the state; Bond's Lear says, " .. . I built this wall to keep our enemies out. ... My wall will make you free .'" The irony is obvious. Lear's way of keeping his enemies out keeps his people in; and kept "inside a fortress" (p. (9), his people become his enemies. Inside the wall, Lear's daughters Bodice and Fontanelle have grown up insulated from evil. So they cannot distinguish between evil and good, and are governed only by their whims. Lear's wall has made them, not good, but incapable of not being bad. Furthermore, in arrogantly assuming he has a right to protect others from ugliness and pain by keeping them inside a prison, Lear has created their understandable desire to be prison guards themselves. Lear himself has also been corrupted by his wall. He interrupts his speech about how his people "are my sheep and ifone of them is lost I'd take fire to hell to bring him out" (p. 2[) to fire on one of his "sheep" because he has slowed down work on the wall. His theoretically good idea blinds him to the implications of his actual behaviour. In fact, everyone who acts badly throughout the play has impeccably good reasons for doing so, most of them having to do with the preservation of social order. As Lear finally tells the old Councillor, "You good, decent, honest, upright, lawful men who believe in order - when the last man dies, you will have killed him" (p. 93). In his preface, Bond suggests that his "Act One shows a world dominated by myth. Act Two shows the clash between myth and reality, between superstitious men and the autonomous world" (p. (2). Apparently "myth" means the PERRY NODELMAN ideas men live by. The map discussed in the first scene of Shakespeare's play shows King Lear's kingdom as he would like it to be; ironically, what the map depicts never comes to be. In Act Two of Bond's play, a soldier says, "We nevercome straight an' the maps is US" (p. 57). They represent reality even less than they once did. But they still have power; as Bodice says, "the map's my straitjacket .... I'm trapped" (p. 62). Lear's wall is a futile attempt to impose the map of his ideas on the real surface of the earth; he even tries to build it across a swamp. Both walls and maps represent the futility of trying to impose human conceptions on the natural world; they imply an attack on the orderly values of Shakespeare's play. But if Lear is only that, its characters must be only caricatures, one-sided representations of Bond's dislike for Shakespeare's political assumptions. To some extent they are that; but caricature is itself a sort of literary wall-building. Governed by a few obvious traits, caricatures cannot respond flexibly to experience. Bond dislikes wall-building; finally he makes us understand that his characters are inflexible, not because he chose to depict them that way, but because the values they live by have made them inflexible, and that they have the potential to be something more. Imprisoned by the walls of myth, the Bodice and Fontanelle of Act One are distasteful caricatures of self-indulgence; as we see the clash between myth and reality in Act Two, Bond demands sympathy for them. Lear's evocation of the ghosts of his daughters' innocent youth shows how his actions have corrupted them; the helplessness of an imprisoned Fontanelle and the confusion of a Bodice straitjacketed by maps imply that even in maturity they are not...