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

  • From: Paul Stone <pas@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2004 16:13:06 -0400

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 

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