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Goneril, a sweetheart, a doting child.
Genuinely loving. Speaking true words of affection, not the honeyed, ass-kiss praise we know from the greatest play ever written – King Lear.
I am no knave but to believe it thus makes me feel knavish.
Yet ‘tis true.
In what one might call a kind of King Lear prequel, George Bottomley, in 1915 wrote King Lear’s wife. I am reading it of late. As we know, in Lear the Queen is dead.
Thus to our grief the obsequies perform'd
Of our too late deceas'd and dearest queen,
Whose soul I hope, possess'd of heavenly joys,
Doth ride in triumph 'mongst the cherubins.
Bottomley’s play, it’s short, revolves around the Queen’s last days before she succumbs to illness. I am not far into it, but already am startled by a good Goneril. I imagine the play will attempt to tell the back story of the Queen’s demise in so far as it sheds some light on how two otherwise sweet daughters from the kingdomly burbs could become such wretched, blood-thirsty wolves. Is this a necessary dot to connect? Not to me. Goneril and Regan are such delicious villains precisely because (like honest Iago) they are just plain mean. This is not to say they are one dimensional characters.
Perhaps Bottomley will plant the idea that they blame their father – somehow – for mom’s death. Who knows. I have yet to find any information on Bottomley’s motivation for writing this play. Cordelia barely figures in the play, is simply a whiny voice off stage calling for her daddy. In the timeline of the play in relation to Lear, I suspect she’s about 5.
Impossible not to see similarities between Lear holding Cordelia in his arms, and Goneril speaking this at her dead mother’s side:
Goneril
This is not death: death could not be like this.
She is quite warm -- though nothing moves in her.
I did not know death could come all at once:
If life is so ill-seated no one is safe.
Cannot we leave her like herself awhile?
Wait awhile, Merryn. . . . No, no, no; not yet!
The "no, no, no, not yet" with Lear's 'never, never ..." etc. And various and sundry other parallels. What, I asketh, is next?
Young Lady MacBeth and the Bad Court Jester.
So, if you are a fan of King Lear (come on now, who isn’t?) you might find the Bottomley play a fun piece of the puzzle.
3 comments:
I recently read a whole bunch of student essays on Lear, and several of the most interesting ones argued that Goneril's actions are not as "plain mean" as other characters in the play make them out to be. In fact, the best of these papers argued, her actions are consistent with her role as "Queen Goneril" -- which was the title of that paper.
Zounds, Andrew. That sounds interesting. I would love to read that paper.
Poisoning her sister to get her out of the way so she can make the two-backed beast with Edgar, though?
Queenly?
Anon.
Edmund. Edmund. Edmund. I mean. Not Edgar.
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