[lit-ideas] Re: tunnel vision or... My eyes, My eyes!

  • From: "Judith Evans" <judithevans001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2004 21:25:34 +0100

He sings well -- what is this nonsense?!

Judy Evans
jaye@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of JulieReneB@xxxxxxx
Sent: 06 April 2004 21:19
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: tunnel vision or... My eyes, My eyes!


Hello pas@xxxxxxxx,

<<starring the uber-acting Mr.
Mandy Pantinkin -- thank god he didn't sing >>

Bite thine tongue, man!  Mandy is a demi-god.  I used to worship at the
altar
of Chicago Hope regularly, merely hoping he would have a song.  I own his
CD's.  I routinely inflict them at high decibel level on my children.
Maybe you
just haven't heard enough of him....  I could send you some copies of my
CD's....we could discuss our favourite tracks....

Julie
aghast in Missouri


========Original Message======== Subj:[lit-ideas] tunnel vision or... My
eyes, My eyes!
Date:4/6/2004 3:15:03 PM Central Daylight Time
From:pas@xxxxxxxx
To:lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent on:

As I was watching a cheesy made-for-tv movie the other night (NTSB: The
crash of something er rather something) starring the uber-acting Mr.
Mandy Pantinkin -- thank god he didn't sing -- I was struck at the end of
the flim (sic) when there was a memorial for the men and women who died in
the crash, one disgruntled father got up and recited some lines from the
last scene of King Lear:

Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I'ld use them so
That heaven's vault should crack. She's gone for ever!
I know when one is dead, and when one lives;
She's dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass;
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why, then she lives.

And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!
Clearly he was addressing the loss of his daughter, but I'm wondering about
the, perhaps ironically so, appropriateness of these quotes for this
particular movie. They seem okay at face value, but even more so if we look
at the underlying message in them from that particular play. I'm wondering
if, in such a cheesy film, the writers could have known the far-reaching
implications of choosing THESE lines in particular from ALL literature or
whether they just picked them because someone vaguely remember a guy whose
daughter died in a "Great Tragedy". It would be quite a coincidence if they
just happened to write about this figuratively blind father regretting the
death of his own "poor fool" in the plane crash.  I've often thought that
there might be a question about who the "fool" in King Lear (other that KL
himself ;-)) is.

Some seem to think that Cordelia IS the fool -- as is apparently evident in
an earlier production of the play.

from http://users.bigpond.net.au/catchus/a000.html

"In the case of King Lear while it has normally been accepted that
"Cordelia" and "Fool" are two different people, there is ample
justification for reading them as the same. Other characters in this play
have more than one speech prefix in the original texts. There was no list
of characters at the beginning of the play in Shakespeare's text. We only
have what is said by the characters to make a judgment concerning possible
duplication. The most obvious argument that can be made in favour of Fool
being Cordelia concerns Lear's last words while he is looking at his dead
daughter, Cordelia, "And my poor Fool is hanged...." I am convinced that
Lear has realized that Cordelia had served him as his Fool, and that he
then dies of a broken heart as Gloucester did in the sub-plot when he
learned that Edgar had been Poor Tom."

This is extremely interesting and I always thought I was the only one with
this idea. While I've seen KL twice performed and many times studied it in
formal settings, this idea has never been mentioned by me OR by anyone
else. The keeper of this website Robert G. Marks, apparently wrote
"Cordelia, King Lear And His Fool" in 1995 -- there's a link to it on the
website. Does anyone know about any scholarship to do with this aspect of
the play? I knew I shoulda stayed in school.


Who knew what treasures lay buried in a tv movie of the week?
Always looking for a reason to say "'Zounds!"

Paul

------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html


------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html


------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html

Other related posts:

  1. Home
  2. lit-ideas
  3. Archive
  4. 04-2004