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Poster for Lear, Sheffield Crucible
This afternoon in 1606, when we arrive with all the crowd at the Globe, we notice the sign for the first time. Totus mundus agit histrionem. Not many of us read Latin. But it means everyone’s an actor. We’re all in this together.
Today’s play is The Tragedy of King Lear. The first actors are on stage. One is obviously the king – must be Lear. Apparently he’s going to abdicate and give himself up to pleasure, especially hunting. He will divide his kingdom up between two of his daughters married to the Dukes of Albany and Gloucester and visit his two daughters’ houses monthly.
But, wait a moment, those are the names of the sons of King James I. Albany and Gloucester. Well we all know what that’s all about.
King James arrived in England from Scotland in 1603 and immediately announced he would unite the two kingdoms into one. He lectured Parliament – at great length – that Britain was the body and he was the head. And no head could have two bodies. Then Parliament shot the king’s proposal down with a great deal of insulting words directed at the dirty and greedy Scots. It’s a story we tell in our series on the Gunpowder Plot.
The link to Lear is all the more obvious to us Groundlings because Lear’s two elder daughters are married to the Duke of Albany (who in 1606 is James’s elder son) and the Duke of Cornwall (the sickly younger brother). And another thing we all know is that James spends almost his entire time out of London, hunting. He leaves running his kingdom to Robert Cecil and anyone who can bear to work with the man. Few can.
#121 The naked King Lear - Ep 3 Shakespeare and the Groundlings
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Bethlem (Bedlam) hospital rebuilt after the Fire of London 1666, at Moorfields
However, as the play goes on we find that Lear’s retirement plan runs into trouble.
His daughters Goneril and Reagan, having taken possession of their shares of the kingdom, want nothing to do with their pleasure-loving father and his retinue of bawdy supporters. In fact, to everyone’s amazement, the king finds himself on the road as a down-and-out vagrant.
And so does Edgar, the son of Lear’s loyal noble friend, the Earl of Gloucester. Now the audience is gripped. Being homeless, on the road, is one thing we all dread almost as much as the plague. 400 plus years later in England, Scotland and Wales people say that we are all only three steps away from being on the streets. Back in 1606 it could take as little as a bout of serious illness.
Edgar, who is in fear of his life because of a complicated subplot, disguises himself by calling himself ‘Tom O’Bedlam.’ Now the audience is laughing. We all know about Tom’O’Bedlam. He is a stock figure. The poor of Bedlam – Bethlehem hospital in Bishopsgate – are often people with psychiatric disorders, written off in the days before modern medicine as ‘insane.’ Inmates at Bethlehem hospital, as at any other, can be licensed to beg on the streets.
But during the course of Elizabeth’s reign disreputable anti-disability propaganda declared that beggars claiming to be mad were usually phoney. They went about with a stock repertoire of mad behaviour – the torn clothes and the sharp objects they stick into themselves. They’re often called ‘Poor Tom.
In the play Edgar repeats the refrain ‘poor Tom is a-cold.’ But instead of giving him a cloak, he is whipped, thrown in the stocks and imprisoned. It’s what anti-disability campaigners wanted to see.
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