Filming Non Space: The Vanishing Point and the Face in Brook's King Lear
Introduction: Textualized Stage Space and Proximity In this essay I explore film adaptation of the famous Dover Cliff scene in King Lear. I apply as critical paradigm the negotiation of the concretized diegetic space of film as an issue central to the adaptation of Shakespeare to the genre codes of film, especially problematized in the case of the self conscious non space of the Dover Cliff scene.1 Critics commonly recognize that Edgar's imaginary cliff calls on the early modern practice of giving stage space textual ized meaning by locating the scene on the brink of an internally generated precipice.2 In this way the metadrama of Edgar's protective improvisation plays with early modern stage conventions of space representation, and fixes Gloucester's blindness as an avatar of audience suspension of disbelief. I ground my exploration of the spatial dynamics of the film adaptation in an investigation of the ethical implications of Edgar's protective improvisation, particularly with reference to the ontology of Emmanuel Levinas. First, I suggest that Edgar's technique of protecting his father by falsehood anticipates the manner in which responsibility for the other precedes, in Levinas, the question of being. Second, I use this Levinasian reading to analyze Peter Brook's 1971 adaptation of the scene. Unlike the lavish court masques of Inago Jones, and the increasing complexity of props, backdrops, lighting, and sound effects within the enclosed space of the proscenium arch of eighteenth and nineteenth century productions, the bare boards of early modern theatres such as The Globe, which jut out into the audience as empty platforms of potential, demand the meaning of the play space be defined by the poetry of the players. The quick scene changes of Shakespeare's later tragedies push to the limits the potential flux of the meaning of the stage space, requiring adept audience conception of the textualized genre codes used to indicate changes in the place of action. As examples of the process of textualizing space in the early modern theatre, Kent's encouragement of Lear to enter Poor Tom's hovel, "Here is the place, my lord" (3.4.1 functions almost exactly as Edgar's first invocation of the cliff, "Come on sir; here's the place" (4.6.11) Both refer to artificial places, but within the context of the play story the space of the hovel is intended as real, whereas the space of the cliff is false: in this way Edgar's textualization of the cliff applies the very techniques, within the imaginary world of the play, used by the play to sustain that ideated dramatic domain. In facilitating the deception, then, Gloucester's blindness functions as parallel to the required audience suspension of disbelief. Edgar does not offer an aside to the audience, clarifying the artifice of the cliff, until just before Gloucester is about to leap, after seventeen lines of vivid description. Until the aside, an audience unfamiliar with the play could very well accept the cliff as real within the reality of the textualized world of the play (perhaps assuming Edgar has prepared some other strategy to prevent the leap of his father) However, the dissonant uncertainty as to how the verbal visual prompts of Edgar should be understood, the artifice of which is clarified by the aside, works to subvert the conventions of the textualized space of the stage, and leads to a subsequent reformulation of the audience's understanding of the space of the play. A great deal of critical energy has been expended in fathoming the precise effects of this reformulation, in attempting to assess how the audience understands the various stages of the deceit. Michael Mooney, for instance, posits a divided audience, torn between "their illusionistic assumptions and their nonillusionistic knowledge" (142) Alan Dessen, on the other hand, gives priority to the undercutting of audience understanding of the verbally structured setting, the most evocative verbal sketch in the play, and the subsequent distancing of audience point of view from Gloucester's passive belief of the cliff.