Nihilism in King Lear Essay

"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport".

Gloucesters words in Shakespeares King Lear represent a sense of futility and of being controlled by external powers revealing hopelessness at every level. As the director of the most recent production of King Lear, I have chosen a nihilistic perspective on the play, emphasizing the bleak and meaningless world of the characters. Such an approach was made famous by Peter Brook 35 years ago on the stage and then in film. My style differs from Brooks almost emotionless and brutally suppressed delivery in that I use the metaphor of time to represent Lears journey which takes him from royalty to desperation, madness to doom.

This approach is highly relevant to a contemporaryglobal society and even our own Sydney context where we find ourselves struggling with family breakdown, environmental disaster and global conflict, a condition of the world that we inherit and which we create for ourselves, as the critic, Frank Kermode says, "a consequence of the human tendency towards evil."

My production has the back wall covered with clocks, the hands progressively moving closer to midnight, with the last one fixed at 11.59pm. The sound of ticking, an allusion to the Doomsday clock, will be modulated according to mood and action, synchronized with the pounding of a heart beat.

Particularly in this scene, but generally throughout the play, I have foregrounded a number of key symbols that support my nihilistic interpretation: fragmentation, death and disease, sight and blindness and nothingness.

King Lear highlights the fragmentation of the individual, the family and the kingdom, supporting the nihilist and existentialist notion that each person is truly alone in a world punctuated by superfluous institutions on which one cannot rely.

Lear's dividing the kingdom is equated with foolishly destroying his own bloodline, propinquity and property of blood, a microcosm of the kingdom, and an extended metaphor for all humanity. Furthermore, the fragmentation of Lears bodymetaphoricallyparallels the fragmentation of his mind. Lear demands that the winds crack open all the moulds from which nature forms human beings. He proclaims that heaven's vault should crack". Using perfect iambic pentameter in the line before this, it now splits, the linguistic fragmentation reflecting the disintegration of the universe.

Images of death and disease abound in King Lear, reflecting a core nihilistic belief that the evil resides within humanity itself. Lear describes his Unburthen'd crawl toward deathforeshadowing the death and civil war to come, the "execution of the rest".Later, Kent implores Lear to "Kill thy physician, and the fee bestow upon thy foul disease." Lear describes Gonerill as "disease that's in my flesh... a boil, a plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle. When he explodes, like the popping of a boil, represented by the repetition of the b sound, so too does the rhythm of his speech. The harsh sounds and emphasis on consonants conveys the intensity of his anger.

And just when the world seems most cruel, it actually robs Gloucester of his one remaining escape the benefit to end itself by death. Not only has he failed in life, but now he fails in his attempt at death.

Clearly, fortunes wheel does not spin cyclically but randomly and the rot cannot be avoided. Both the good and evil doers are struck down. No one is safe from Fortunes tyranny. In Act One the good are displaced by the bad and in 5.3 the bad are displaced by the good. There is indeed no justice in this heartless world.

References to sight and blindness support the nihilistic argument that true insight is gained through suffering (e.g. being blinded) but the suffering reveals only the void that is the real human state. Clearly, this nothingness shows that life is meaningless and a person can depend on nothing.

Gonerill announces that she loves her father "Dearer than eye-sight", ironically foreshadowing the blinding of Gloucester. The eyes prevent true 'insight', where blindness and suffering bring understanding. Redemption can only be achieved through physical, emotional and psychological suffering highlighting the bleakness and futility of humanity and life.

Lear makes the world meaningless by divesting himself of all responsibility. He retains only the title of king, represented by the use of the royal we, but none of its duties. From here on, he moves down a path, where "nothing will come of nothing". Cordelias "Nothing, my lord... Nothing" is a metaphor for the moral void in this bleak society, foreshadowing the nothing that will be left at the end of the chaos. Gonerill and Regan strip Lear of his train, his only remaining symbol of power and affluence and he is reduced to nothing. Lacking insight he projects the source of his madness onto Gonerill in straight iambic pentameter, I prithee, daughter do no make me mad.

The desperate repetition of monosyllabic words, "kill", howl, no, now, fie and pah emphasises Lear's descent into madness, as he is reduced to animal status, an "unaccommodated man". He abandons the natural order of iambic pentameter and his pattern of speech diminishes to meaningless words, a voiceless man in a pitiless universe.

Moreover, using extensive animal imagery to symbolise dehumanisation, Lear is reduced to his essential, bestial self; "a poor, bare, forked animal", and claims that Man's life is cheap as beast's.

Lear has learned theres no point in invoking the gods, to the extent that he ends up praying to the poor naked wretches. It is Albany who prays for Cordelia's safety, asking that "The gods defend her". Here, in my production, the characters all look towards the clocks, which defiantly strike 12. Doomsday has arrived.

In this new nihilistic production of King Lear, people suffer consequences of their actions that seem out of proportion to those actions. However, it is not just that we are at the mercy of the wanton boyish gods. It is worse than that. Edmond knows that the problem is in ourselves, "will and power, must make perforce an universal prey." There is no hope for humanity because the real source of evil lies within us. Lear is the engineer of his kingdom's disintegration into nothingness, as Gloucester says, "ruin'd piece of nature! This great world shall so wear out to nought."The play ends as disastrously as it began, without hope of resurrection.