Lear Act 5: howl howl howl

A fairly quick wrap up on this beautiful beautiful play:
5.1
Sisterly tensions remain high and Regan directly confronts Edmund about his involvement with Goneril:
Now, sweet lord, You know the goodness I intend upon you: Tell me--but truly--but then speak the truth, Do you not love my sister?
Of course Edmund denies it all and is very cool and coy about the whole situation. Edgar sneaks into the scene and gives a letter to Albany then disappears again. there are so many things conveyed via letter/so much importance in these little bits of props in this play!!
 ALBANY 
Stay till I have read the letter.
EDGAR 
I was forbid it. 
When time shall serve, let but the herald cry, 
And I'll appear again.
ALBANY 
Why, fare thee well: I will o'erlook thy paper.
The scene ends with a final zinger of a soliloquy from Edmond:
To both these sisters have I sworn my love; Each jealous of the other, as the stung Are of the adder. Which of them shall I take? Both? one? or neither?
Both, one, or neither. what a statement! This would be a great audience interaction teaching moment, and also a great teaching moment about how much more interesting it is to watch an actor decide something in the moment instead of playing it as though their character has pre-decided. and he ends the speech with a very ominous bit of rhetoric:
 As for the mercy
Which he intends to Lear and to Cordelia,
The battle done, and they within our power,
Shall never see his pardon; for my state
Stands on me to defend, not to debate.
Let's not talk about it or debate what's right. let's just kill "to defend the state" hmmmm.... think on that and on who is saying it.
5.2
A very short scene between Edgar and Gloucester where we find Lear has lost the battle. Gloucester wants to despair and die but Edgar continues to urge him on:
GLOUCESTER 
No farther, sir; a man may rot even here.
EDGAR 
What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure 
Their going hence, even as their coming hither; 
Ripeness is all: come on.
GLOUCESTER 
And that's true too.
Men must endure. I think Checkhov would have loved Edgar.
 5.3
 The epic final scene begins with Edmund sending Lear and Cordelia off to prison. Lear has the most beautiful line about this:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies,
Regan and Goneril continue to fight and regan has this gem (add it to the etsy shop list):
Jesters do oft prove prophets.
but soon her jests stop as she is in a lot of pain- POISON times.
 Lady, I am not well; else I should answer From a full-flowing stomach
Albany challenges Edmund for his villainy:
 There is my pledge;
[Throwing down a glove]
I'll prove it on thy heart,But before they can fight Edgar comes in and without saying who he is vows to fight Edmund himself:
Thy valour and thy heart, thou art a traitor;
False to thy gods, thy brother, and thy father;
Conspirant 'gainst this high-illustrious prince;
And, from the extremest upward of thy head
To the descent and dust below thy foot,
A most toad-spotted traitor.
Albany has a great zinger to Goneril:
Shut your mouth, dame, Or with this paper shall I stop it: Hold, sir: Thou worse than any name, read thine own evil:
What a great stage picture. threatening someone with a letter? And having it actually be a threat? There's something very chilling about that. In what you could contend is one of the worst marriages in the shakespeare canon, Albany continues to call Goneril names to the end.
ALBANY 
Most monstrous! oh! 
Know'st thou this paper?
GONERIL 
Ask me not what I know.
And with an Iago like silence Goneril ends the play refusing to speak more.
Edmund loses the fight and takes the blow of fate with what seems like instant acceptance:
The wheel is come full circle: I am here.
Edgar takes this time while his brother is dying to tell us that Gloucester died:
his flaw'd heart, Alack, too weak the conflict to support! 'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, Burst smilingly.
And Edmund has this beautiful line before he dies:
Yet Edmund was beloved: 
The one the other poison'd for my sake, 
And after slew herself.
I like to think that realizing he had his own twisted kind of undeserved love, Edmund is transformed. But I suppose you can come up with your own reasons for why he says this next line:
 I pant for life: some good I mean to do, Despite of mine own nature
He tries to save Cordelia and Lear by telling them what he did with the death edict, but of course it is too late. And what we get is one of the most heartbreaking scenes in literature. if any could benefit from Linklater voice work, I think it's this one. There's something in the very nature of "HOWL" and "never" that resonate physically and vocally:

[Re-enter KING LEAR, with CORDELIA dead in his arms; EDGAR, Captain, and others following]
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. 
Any of you who have lost someone very dear to you don't need to be told how appropriate howling is to express that kind of heartbreak. The one small consolation Lear gets in this final scene is Kent revealing he was with him and true to him the whole time:
 That, from your first of difference and decay, Have follow'd your sad steps.
A pause for a bit of humor in this heartbreaking scene, soon after the above exchange a Captain enters and let's us know:
[Enter a Captain]
Captain 
Edmund is dead, my lord.
Funny story- my dad played this part in college and one night, not paying attention to the lines and letting his mind wander, my dad heard a pause in the action and thinking he missed his entrance, loudly announced Edmund's death- about ten or twenty lines earlier than he was supposed to as it was just someone's dramatic pause. ooops. He then loudly said "oh shit"... bigger ooops. so every time I get to this part in the play where i feel like i can hardly breathe from all the emotion, I think of that story and i can push through to the end...
Lear then continues with a line that really resonates with anyone struggling with the nature and seeming randomness of mortality:
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!
Of course Lear dies and Albany tries to fix what's left of the realm and carry on, but Kent is a servant of Lear's to the end and will follow wherever he goes:
ALBANY 
Friends of my soul, you twain Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain. KENT 
I have a journey, sir, shortly to go;
My master calls me, I must not say no.
ALBANY 
The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The continued rhyming at the end of the play fascinates me. Not just the final closing couplet but all those couplets leading to the end. anyone have thoughts on that? It seems a very strange place to rhyme. And the play ends. Like the quote from Professor Cohen i referenced last post, it gives us no happy endings because it gives us no false consolations. the source text has cordelia live and shakespeare says sometimes the best people don't get to live and that's life and how do we deal with that and move forward? And we are left to sort that for ourselves with only the comforts of grace and undeserved love.
On that note... Dan and I are off to mass.