Lear Elucidated

Epperson and Stair have combined their talents, the former as editor and Shakespearean scholar, the latter as illustrator and book designer, to produce a new edition of Shakespeare's most somber tragedy. Most somber and most enigmatic. For above all the other major tragedies written during those few years when Shakespeare stared into the heart of darkness - Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Antonyand Cleopatra - King Lear adamantly defies the critic-scholars' categories. And no wonder. What can an analyst do, after all, with a play in which, with all its multi-level irony, paradox, and verbal complexity, much of the tragic experience comes finally to focus in a single line consisting of the simple word "never" repeated five times?

Nevertheless, it remains one of the most majestic creations of the human imagination, like Michelangelo's David or Dante's DivineComedy. Its power endures. Epperson and Stair set out not so much to unearth the secrets of that power as to make the power and majesty more accessible to the reader. Their method is unique. Epperson's perceptive, analytical introduction; a dramatic new typographical layout; and, perhaps most important, Stair's black-and-white interpretive drawings depicting scenes and actions from the play: these three elements are combined to adduce a coherent experience, the King Lear experience, in the imagination of the reader.

No footnotes, no typographical clutter, no dryasdust exegeses, nothing extraneous to divert the reader fom his main job, the creation of the central experience of the play. Astonishingly, on almost no page does the eye encounter only a body of print; nearly every page also bears one of the interpretive drawings. Thus are conveyed, as the editor hopes, "clearer expressions of dramatic relationships, more of the subtleties of tone and nuance, than are normally found in the traditional editions of King Lear" And thus the play is to some degree seen as well as read by this unique conjoining of word and image.

Designed "to imitate some of the visual and psychological effects one experiences in the theatre," Stair's drawings are strikingly successful, the more so since by skillful manipulation of layout each is so positioned on the page that a line from the play, placed in close proximity, serves, so to speak, as a caption. Perhaps predictably, those drawings depicting the more intensely emotional scenes seem most successful: the mad Lear and the wise Fool on the storm-swept heath ("Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!"); the harrowing blinding of Gloucester; Edmund's incredulous realization that the very force of Nature he had contemned had destroyed him ("Yet Edmund was belov'd"). In such intense moments Stair's drawings "say" much. Not all, surely, for Shakespeare's language, his imagery, his metaphors, are, after all, the play. But enough to supply powerful visual assistance to the reader in creating the King Lear experience. And that is no small achievement.

THE KING LEAREXPERIENCEBy Professor James A. Eppersonand Gobin Stair '33Beacon, 1976. 162 pp.Hardcover, $12.50; paper, $4.95