Charlie Rose

REMant  11/15/2011 11:14 AM Report

I'm afraid I can't see Mr Waterston as Lear. Too skinny, I guess. I did the sound effects for a production of Lear in college - not an easy assignment - and once was more familiar with the play than I am now. I know it is a retelling of an ancient British legend, but I would think, like Hamlet which followed, it was meant also to be taken as contemporary commentary. It is hard not to imagine it intended to identify Lear with Elizabeth and the two elder daughters, the two Protestant factions which sought to succeed her, Essex's and Robert Cecil's, the former including the Bacons, nephews of the elder Cecil and "projectors" akin to our liberals and neocons, and the latter allied with the "commonwealth men" and more republican, while Cordelia is meant to represent unloved and outcast Catholicism, perhaps even Mary, herself, both killed in the end. Commentators have come close to this interpretation already, pointing out the references to the different philosophical worldviews. Too, susceptibility to flattery was certainly one of Elizabeth's shortcomings, and she relished displays of grandeur and encouraged adulation. Francis Bacon, incidentally, won favor as well with James, was also gay, his vaunted scientific methodology had more in common with scholastic Aristotleanism than with anything we follow today, and he, no more than Oxford, authored the plays.