On Reading King Lear Again

      It's an old argument that many of my former students have encountered, mainly from me, that Albany is probably the least understood character in Lear. I don't want to beat an antique drum here, but I do want to say that in rereading things tonight-- and don't ask me why I was rereading Lear when I should have been focussing on A&C or doing more marking, but I think-- keyword: think-- I've located the tonalities and performative dimensions of Albany, most of whose words in the fifth act need to rendered with sufficent terseness and direct invective to best understand his functions in the play. His lines have to be read, by my understanding, with a kind of adversarial daring, of brooking no longer the manipulations to which he allowed himself previously to be deceived. Maybe, perhaps when I get closer to teaching the play proper again (a few weeks away), I'll post here, to whoever's (or no one's, perhaps) edification, my own 'directorial' notes on how the part should be played, and how his lines need to be understood as a turning of the chessboard, and, indeed, a reinvention of the game he'd not known entirely was being played. In many ways, he, along with Edgar, is a nemetic figure, except that, unlike Edgar, he has been subject to a temporary blindness, the third in a triple pillar of blindness in the play (Gloucester and Lear being the other pillars). In part, Albany is a kind of Everyman, but he is not a coward, and nor is he indifferent, once he's awakened to the dimensions of humanity perpetrated by Goneril and company. And, even, there's an extent to which his (necessary) defeat of Cordelia's French army is basically a gesture of moving matters into his own domain. He's larger than we tend to assume, especially since our sympathetic attentions are so firmly fixed on Cordelia and Lear. But he's also an enabling figure in the turning of the tide, and a welcome one at that. Like Cordelia, his absences in the previous acts are, I think, as meant to be felt as such, in the if only sense.

Of which, perhaps more later. If anyone cares.