The Book that Changed my Life: 'King Lear'

 by Bryony Hart

There are so many books out there that have moved me to tears, laughter and joy, but none more than William Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606). I feel that I am cheating a little by saying that this is the book that changed my life because it isn’t a novel or a short story, which I suspect most people would come to expect, but it is a play that is over 400 years old.  Yet, this play changed the course of my life in so many ways. Let me paint the scene.

1995. E1: Mr Pike’s A Level class. The room is full. Full of 1990s teenagers who listen to Pulp, Oasis, Blur and Nirvana and attempt to write poetry (very badly). In those days, Literature A Level was the subject to be taking and every seat would have been taken. Some might say that English Literature was the jam. 

Mr Pike is standing at the front of the class when all of a sudden he starts booming out Lear’s famous heath scene. He looks demonic and out of control. The class is horrified yet equally transfixed by this crazed English teacher prancing round in front of the blackboard (yes, the really old type that you could roll around so that you could have a number of lessons pre-planned in chalk for the day ahead). He screams at the top of his lungs:

Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!

Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:

I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;

I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,

You owe me no subscription: then let fall

Your horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave,

A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:

But yet I call you servile ministers,

That have with two pernicious daughters join'd

Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head

So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul! [Act 3.2]

I think I might have embellished my memory, but I am pretty sure that spittle flew in all directions. It was pretty gross. But it didn’t matter. The words filled the room erasing everything else. 

And this is the moment. The moment when I realised that literature could move me more than anything else. Lear, after giving away his land and power to his rather wicked daughters, Regan and Goneril, who then ‘hit together’ to push him out of the kingdom, is effectively banished.  He is outside of the castle gates exposed to the elements with just a few loyal supporters (one including the seemingly mad man, Poor Tom) all because of power, greed and a desire to have it all. 

I feel pity for the man. Not the king, but the man who is old and rejected, a father who has made rash decisions and is now paying the price. I am torn between this feeling because just a few moments ago I felt absolute hatred towards this same man who rejects his own faithful daughter, Cordelia, because he fails to listen to her truthful declarations of love at the start of the play. Yet, here he is now, a weak old man whose fragile white head is exposed to the thunderous storm above and to wicked plans that are being concocted safely behind the castle gates. And what makes this play even more compelling is that there is a parallel plot where a similar situation is unfolding with the Gloucester family. It’s totally unbearable and scintillating all at the same time. 

This is the book that made me love literature so much that when Mr Pike suggested that the business degree, which I had been planning towards with much gusto, was really the wrong route and that reading English would be far more suitable, I had to agree. 

The obsession with the text didn’t stop there. When I got to university I wrote my final dissertation on the origins of the play, and as soon as it came on to the A Level syllabus, I was teaching it to Sixth Formers, spending hours creating resources and re-researching this most wonderful of plays. I have lost count of how many productions I have attended.  My personal favourite was the one with Nigel Hawthorne playing Lear simply because I remember the massive boulders that flew down onto the stage during the exact speech above unintentionally bounced wildly off into the audience. The most infuriating production I saw was at The Globe. Mrs Burkinshaw and I had taken a group of Sixth Formers and at the ending of the play, which I won’t spoil here, but it is enough to know that it will make your howl like a child, someone’s phone started ringing and they couldn’t turn it off. Everything the play was working towards lost in a moment of technological intrusion. 

I reconstruct the Pike lesson every time I teach this text, but with a few adaptations. Firstly, I have the benefit of technology so I play a loud thunderous soundtrack with lashing rain in the background. Secondly, I teach at one of the most wonderful schools in the county where the pupils can’t wait to throw themselves onto the stage and liberate their inner Lears atop the desks of G0. Alex Gibson, Sacha Hemmingway, Joe Brennan and many more have done Mr Pike proud. Future pupils will be pleased to know that there will be no spittle spillage on my watch. 

The legacy lives on and I hope that, over the years, one of my Sixth Formers has been equally transfixed as I was all those years ago in the stuffy E1 classroom in the New Forest. I have to admit to being a latecomer to literature and I owe it all to this man, who is now a Professor at Leeds University. I always make sure I send him a Christmas card each year to remind him of this fact.