JAFP 6 (2) pp.

109–124 Intellect Limited 2013

Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance

Volume 6 Number 2
© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jafp.6.2.109_1

Annamária Fábián

The art of avoidance:

Avoidance as a means of
(re)creation in a prequel
adaptation to Shakespeare’s
King Lear

Abstract Keywords
This article attempts to give a reading of a play by Elaine Feinstein and the Women’s prequel
Theatre Group, Lear’s Daughters through/with Stanley Cavell’s essay ‘The avoid- avoidance
ance of love’. It examines how avoidance and causality re- and de-form, recreate cause and effect
King Lear in Lear’s Daughters. Cavell’s essay serves as a guideline, an ‘inter-text’ or King Lear
a bridge between the two plays in question, providing all the key notions and thoughts Lear’s Daughters
by which the prequel’s creative art of avoidance can be examined, as here avoidance Stanley Cavell
will be possible to comprehend as a means of creation, or a writing technique.

In 1987, the Women’s Theatre Group (WTG) in cooperation with Elaine

Feinstein chose to adapt Shakespeare’s King Lear in the form of a prequel.
Lear’s Daughters was written in 1987 and first published in 1991 (in Griffin
and Ashton 1991) and has ever since remained one of the most intriguing
approaches to Shakespeare’s King Lear. As I will try to demonstrate in the
next pages, Lear’s Daughters takes its shape by avoiding several aspects of
Shakespeare’s text and characters.

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Annamária Fábián

1. All of the references If the word avoidance comes up, especially when coupled with King Lear,
from Cavell’s essay are
from this edition: Cavell
there is a piece in the massive and vast material of Shakespeare literary theo-
(1987). Page numbers retical/critical discourse that seems unavoidable. Stanley Cavell’s ‘The avoid-
are referred to after the ance of love’ was first published in 1969 in Must We Mean What We Say? In
quotation in brackets.
  All of the quotations Cavell’s understanding, as it is discussed in the first part of his essay, the main
taken from Cavell’s motivation in King Lear that results in tragedy and the main motivation for
essay are indented in King Lear to trigger tragedy is to try to avoid love, as to love and to be loved
italics.
equals self-recognition, self-revelation and self-sacrifice. This is, naturally, an
2. The most important oversimplified and extremely narrow reading of Cavell’s multi-layered and
landmarks concerning
this are Roland complex essay, but can be derived as a short conclusion. As Cavell puts it,
Barthes’ The Death
of the Author, Michel
Foucault’s What is
Lear’s dominating motivation […] from the time things go wrong in the
an Author? and Julia opening scene, is to avoid being recognized […].1
Kristeva’s The Bounded (46)
Text, and a very
clear and important
summary of how To put it another way, in Cavell’s reading, the complete destruction and
intertextuality and the voidness at the end of the play derives from the inability to accept and
adaptation studies
intertwine can be provide love,
read in Julie Sanders’
book, Adaptation and
Appropriation (2006:
avoidance of recognition and the shame of exposure, the threat of
1–14). self-revelation.
(58)

In the second part of his essay, the main line is arranged by the complex issue
of the responsibility and reaction of the spectator as self, and the functional
reasons and mechanisms of tragedy in general. Both parts offer key notions
that will be crucial for this article’s purpose, and the most important ones will
occur along the lines of avoidance and acknowledgement on the one hand, and
causality, present/past and responsibility on the other.
As Cavell’s argumentation points out, avoidance (of love, of recognition)
has the potential to destroy and to trigger tragedy. However, avoidance, as it
happens with Lear’s Daughters, is also possible to comprehend as a means of
creation, a writing technique, so to say. This article attempts to give a read-
ing of Lear’s Daughters through/with Cavell’s essay, examining how avoidance
and causality re- and de-form, recreate King Lear. Cavell’s essay will serve as
a guideline and will be an ‘intertext’ or a bridge between the two plays in
question, providing all the key notions and thoughts by which the prequel’s
creative art of avoidance can be examined. Therefore, the high number and
the extension of the Cavell quotes is necessary. With this multi-layered read-
ing, the aim is to present how the attempts of a prequel adaptation (Lear’s
Daughters) to avoid the origins (the author, the text and the character of King
Lear) will result in a complete redefinition of those very origins in question.

Women writing a man – the avoidance of the author

‘Cordelia No cause, no cause’.
(IV.7/2834)

Although postmodern literary theory tends to deny the importance, or even the
existence of the author as a dominating factor within the interpretive process,2
in case of adaptations it seems that the avoidance of the authors involved is
not possible. To define what an adaptation is, theorists tend to return to the

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presence of the author(s) over and over again.3 As an adaptation is always 3. To name just a few
adaptation-theorists
an acknowledged work/process, it has to be possible to separate it from both who seem unable to
plagiarisms and translations, as well as unconscious intertextual references, get rid of the author
and the act of acknowledging seems to need the label of the authors, both function are Ruby Cohn
in Modern Shakespeare
the adapter and especially the adapted author. In case of Lear’s Daughters, it is Offshoots (1976), Daniel
not only intriguing but it also seems vital to involve both the persons and the Fischlin and Mark
methods of the adapters in the discussion. Fortier in Adaptations
of Shakespeare (see
When an adapted text is Shakespeare’s, the adapter is well aware of the fact especially 2000: 5), Julie
that it is not simply an author we are talking about, as his person has devel- Sanders in Adaptation
and Appropriation
oped into something like an institution: ‘more than a figure of literary history (see especially 2006
or a cultural obsession, […] Shakespeare has become a complex network of 7–9, 45–48), Linda
discoursive, cultural and historical practises…’ (Fischlin and Fortier 2000: 9) Hutcheon in A Theory
of Adaptation (who
and his name has become the label of guarantee on various literary and theat- actually insists that
rical products. It is only lately that an antithesis of his name and work can also the author’s personal
be popular, and be valued as interesting or outstanding as a literary achieve- motivation to adapt a
text might be crucial to
ment – but even these ‘products’ seem to gain (financially, culturally or other- a fuller understanding
wise) from the mere occurrence of the name. Considered from this point of of the adaptation, see
especially 2006: 111)
view, it is interesting to ask why and in what ways would an adaptation of his and Margaret Jane
work attempt to avoid the name, age and person of Shakespeare, as this is Kidnie in Shakespeare
exactly what Lear’s Daughters does. and the Problem of
Adaptation (2009).
The creating process of Lear’s Daughters already raises intriguing questions,
as this creation is avoiding all the centuries old, ‘traditional’ ways of writ-
ing. First, the new text was born by female authors contrasting the dominant
(male) presence of William Shakespeare. The play challenges ‘the authority of
Shakespeare, the cumulative power of mainstream production and the oper-
ation of that authority in the politics of culture’ (Bennett 1996:51). Second,
the WTG, as Itzin Catherine has put it, ‘avoid working in the hierarchical,
competitive structures which characterise the male-dominated establish-
ment of theatre and media’ (1980: 230). This is the reason for deploying group
writing strategies, the group of female authors contrasting the sole and quasi
omnipotent name above the King Lear drama. As Daniel Fischlin and Mark
Fortier put it,

[the] communal genesis of the play puts the very idea of authorship into
question and challenges long-entrenched notions circulating around the
individuality of the author. […] and it is no accident that WTG under-
took the revision of a major Shakespearean tragedy from the perspec-
tive of a feminist collective.
(2000: 215)

The strictly feminine genesis is indeed a markedly different approach to any

Shakespeare text, and this femininity gains additional meanings in the case of
King Lear, where the setting and the opening scene provides the ground for
the exchange from patriarchal to matriarchal, and the focal point of the play
shifts from the royal and familial male oppression to female dominance.
However, the communal contrasting the singular authorial power is some-
what less obvious, because even though Shakespeare as a massive autho-
rial presence is unavoidable, it is now common knowledge that Renaissance
authorial practices were not obviously individual and isolated ways of creation.
Shakespeare, in fact, just like most authors and dramatists of his time, was an
author writing most of his plays, adapting and reworking other previously writ-
ten works, and he was also co-author of several plays. Therefore, the avoidance

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Annamária Fábián

4. Cf. Cavell’s longer of the male author and involving exclusively female genitors is definitive in the
argumentation about
Shakespeare’s possible
case of Lear’s Daughters, whereas the challenge of individual authorship by the
views on primogeniture communal authorial cooperation is less obviously significant.
and a patriarchal The fact that the feminist community chose to approach Shakespeare in
society and its place
in our interpretation the form of a prequel raises other appealing questions about the notion of
today (1987: 48–49). authorship. As the author of the prequel adaptation is not the same as the
author of the origin play, the continuity of interpretative strategies might
seem to be damaged and a discrepancy felt, for many reasons. As Lizbeth
Goodman puts it in connection with the communal genesis of and the criti-
cal responses to Lear’s Daughters, there is a traceable discomfort in the audi-
ences and critics about the play, and this ‘discomfort may be related to the
lack of an individual author, a situation which eliminates the identifiable
“subject” (or individual) to be criticized in relation to the “object” which is
the play’ (Goodman 1993: 99). The same discomfort can be observed concern-
ing the creation of a prequel or sequel to a piece of a given author: the ‘real
thing’, the generally accepted precedent or continuation would be the work
of that same author; the real past/future of a particular piece (say, King Lear)
would be what Shakespeare would have written – would he have written it.
Shakespeare did not, however, elaborate on what future he would imagine for
Kent or Edgar, and left his audience with no knowledge about the childhood
traumas, dreams and relationships of Goneril, Regan and Cordelia, or the life
and death of Queen Lear.

We are not in Shakespeare’s confidence. Now tragedy grows from the

fortunes we choose to interpret, to accept, as inevitable […]

– says Cavell, and in case of Lear’s Daughters the group of female writers chose
to interpret and to accept only those ‘fortunes’ or aspects of King Lear out
of which they could produce their feminist play problematizing the effects
of the oppression of the patriarchal society and the father in a dominating
position within the family, and therefore they avoid certain very possible
readings intended by Shakespeare in his time, such as the political message
about the possible outcomes of the division of the kingdom, the uncondi-
tional loyalty to the King (Kent), the right of primogeniture and legitimacy
(Edgar and Edmund). Their tragedy grows from events taking place before
Shakespeare’s King Lear actually begins, and their choices of ‘roots’ avoid a
range of Shakespearean topics raised in King Lear. In addition, there is a more
obvious reason for the possible want of the feeling of continuity in the inter-
pretative strategies: Lear’s Daughters is a (post)modern answer, avoiding all
the circumstantial/historicizing interpretations involving Shakespeare’s time
and world. This contemporary play by contemporary women necessarily (by
the distance of some four hundred years) and deliberately avoids the time and
person of William Shakespeare.4

Catching up with the origin – the avoidance of the text

‘Lear O reason not the need’.
(II. 4/1564)

Prequel adaptations form a special branch in adaptation studies. In fact, there

is no consensus among adaptation theorists whether prequels can actually be
accepted as adaptations at all. Julie Sanders does include prequels as interesting

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 The art of avoidance

pieces ‘celebrating [the] ongoing interaction with other texts and artistic produc- 5. To give two other
examples for King Lear,
tions. […] sequels, prequels … have a role to play … in the adaptive mode’ Gordon Bottomley’s
(Sanders 2006: 18). Linda Hutcheon, however, dismisses them from her discus- King Lear’s Wife does
sion and this is mainly due to prequels’ special handling of the time and plotline not place the three
daughters into the
of the adapted text. Hutcheon claims that ‘[t]here is a difference between never centre, but the Queen
wanting a story to end – the reason behind prequels and sequels […] – and of Lear, who is also
wanting to retell the same story over and over in different ways’ (Hutcheon sick and dies (this is
a shared motive with
2006: 9). Indeed, prequel (and sequel) adaptations tend to write around the Lear’s Daughters), and
adapted text and not over it, but this fact alone does not dismiss and exclude except for Goneril,
the girls are not
them from being treated as adaptations. Even more so, because the four crite- characterized. In
ria of Hutcheon defining adaptations smoothly fit prequels as well: they also Howard Barker’s Seven
are acknowledged transpositions of a recognizable other work; involve a crea- Lears, Lear is presented
in seven stages of his
tive act of appropriation/salvaging; are extended intertextual engagements with life, as a child, a youth
the adapted work (cf. Hutcheon 2006: 8); and always rely on familiarity with a and even later as a
difference, repetition with variation (cf. Hutcheon 2006: 4). young king. He is in the
centre of the play and
This hesitation to include them into adaptation studies is telling, though: it all other characters
stresses the special relationship of prequel adaptations to their origins. Prequel are supporting the
re-characterization
adaptations, although necessarily and by definition are written after their and reinterpretation of
origin-text, provide that very origin with a past, and present events happening Lear. Both adaptations
before the events of the origin play. They usually involve generational differ- are prequels to
Shakespeare, and yet
ences and tensions, and very often feed on the gaps and opaque hints found both are completely
in the origin-text. They do not try to provide a background for every single different approaches,
character or plotline of the origin play. Much rather, instead of a complete ‘resulting’ in the same
tragedy.
backstory, by providing segmental explanations, they offer new possible inter-
pretative strategies and paths for the origin play, like other types of adapta- 6. As they do, for
example, in Stoppard’s
tions tend to do. Several prequel adaptations can exist parallelly, and – though Rosencrantz and
sharing similar motives – all will necessarily afford different approaches to the Guildenstern are
Dead or Csaba Kiss’s
origin play, due to their difference in time, space and cultural scope: some Homecoming to
may avoid topics and characters the other treats as central to the plot; they Denmark (Hazatérés
may differ in their focal points, where and when the events take place etc., Dániába).
and consequently their explanations, analyses, their results and their causa-
tive structures will vary greatly.5 Their outcome, however, the aim where these
prequels head to, is the same: they have to arrive to the origin play, and in our
case the realms of King Lear. This means that none of the events or actions of
the origin play and the adaptation can run parallelly,6 and there is no shared
time and space between the plays, and in a way this conscious pre-setting
of the adaptation becomes an act of avoidance in itself. Being ‘primer’ to
the origin provides a unique possibility to avoid its oppressive presence, its
‘presentness’ in the interpreting process. The perception or attitude demanded in
following this drama, says Cavell about performing King Lear,

is one which demands a continuous attention to what is happening at

each here and now, as if everything of significance is happening at this
moment […] I think of it as an experience of continuous presentness.
[…] to let the past go and to let the future take its time; so that we not
allow the past determine the meaning of what is now happening and we
not anticipate what will come of what has come. Not that anything is
possible (though it is) but that we do not know what is, and is not, next.
(93)

The prequel adaptation, by ‘anticipating’ what had come of what has come,
turns into the very past determining the meaning of what is happening in

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Annamária Fábián

King Lear, and turns itself into past and King Lear into a future. ‘We do not
know what was, and was not, before’ seem to be the triggering factor for the
prequel to take its shape. To ‘discover’ the past of Lear, and his daughters is
the main aim of the prequel – and in this case we do know ‘what is, and is
not, next’.

What precedes certain discoveries is a necessity to return to a work, in

fact or in memory, as to unfinished business. And this may be neutral as
between rereading and reseeing.
(85)

Rewriting in the form of a prequel is also a form of discovery, a very active

form of returning (unlike the more passive reseeing or rereading mentioned
by Cavell), and as such it cannot be said to remain neutral, as it will produce
a new interpretation with a new, settled and final textual form, to which it
is possible to return to again, to rewrite again. King Lear, therefore, can be
interpreted as ‘unfinished business’ for the genitors of Lear’s Daughters, and
unfinished in several meanings: on the one hand, it is unfinished business in
Cavell’s sense, namely, that one must return to it because it would not let be,
would not let go, urging for new understandings again and again; and on the
other hand, it is unfinished in the sense that it is not a whole, not a complete
unity of causes and effects, but there are gaps to fill in, opaque or missing
parts to find out more about, to be explained.
Lear’s Daughters returns to the Shakespeare text and back to the pre-
history of Shakespeare’s Lear and his family because they find that right at
the beginning of Shakespeare, the opening scene, where the division of the
kingdom and the love test take place is in need of explanation, events need
motivations, and characters need refinement and reshaping. Cavell also has
his doubts concerning this scene of utmost intensity:

The abdication scene has always been known to be extraordinary, and

a familiar justification of it has been that we, as spectators, simply must
accept it as the initial condition of the dramatic events and then attend
to its consequences. […] We do accept [the opening scene’s] events as
they come to light; […] after which, as a consequence of which, we have
to accept less obviously extraordinary events as unquestionable work-
ings out of a bad beginning.
(87)

However, not accepting the opening scene’s events as they come to light
stimulates the existence of adaptations, of prequels by any means: they want
to create, to light up the events of that past, the past

which […] erupts into the present, in which reason or emotion fail.
(105)

and viewed from that opening abdication scene of Shakespeare’s play, Lear’s
Daughters is the very past that would erupt in King Lear’s present. With the
prequel at hand, the openings of King Lear might lose the stereotypical
figures of the choleric old father and the pretending evil elder daughters as
opposed to the goodhearted one. Interestingly, though, and deriving from
the selective nature of this prequel adaptation to provide a background only

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for certain aspects of King Lear, only the central motif, the division/love test 7. It would be interesting
to examine whether
gains new interpretations. The real opening scene, the ‘first characters, […] the prequel can or
two old courtiers discussing the event of the day’, is left untouched, unnoticed (as cannot function
in many stage adaptations and theoretical analyses of King Lear). The conse- without its origin play.
Is the ‘content’ able to
quence of this is a logical and causal glitch of continuity between the two find its full meaning
plays, which can be overlooked easily as unimportant, but which will have its if the origin play does
consequences with the reinterpretation of King Lear himself (to be discussed not bring out the
events following the
in the last phase of the essay.) prequel? In my opinion,
prequel adaptations
rely on their origins
There is danger in the truth that everything which happens is ‘contained’ more than other types
in these openings. For [a] postulate of ‘organic form’ the dominant of adaptations do,
postulate of modern analysis both in poetry and in music, may suggest precisely because of
the continuity of time
that what succeeds the presence of the opening is all that could have and their ‘pastness’
succeeded it. they wish to create for
(113) themselves.

The prequels, if seen as postulates of an organic form, also suggest that the
prequel text – almost as a new opening scene to the play – carries the follow-
ing events (including the opening scene, or, more precisely: especially the
opening scene) pre-coded in itself, that the events and actions of the prequel
are now ‘containing’ the opening scene and (necessarily, as a cause and effect
chain of events) all its succeeding consequences. However, for prequel adap-
tations there is truth also in the opposite of what Cavell says: what precedes
the presence of the opening scene is all that could have preceded it, and more
naturally so, because past events are usually and normally unchangeable.
And this is exactly what prequels take their biggest advantage of: the audi-
ence’s natural instinct of time order strengthens their interpretation of events
and characters alike, and therefore the presented past becomes what had
happened – contained in these openings.

[…] anything that goes on to happen inevitably bears marks of what has
gone before. What has gone before was not inevitable, but when it has
happened its marks are inevitable. […] “The content” of the opening
means nothing until it is brought out. And when it all comes out and
is brought to a close its content is not exhausted. We could say it has
infinite content.
(113)

Given their somewhat paradoxical status in time (evolving the story time past
for the origin-text but being composed in a real-time future of that same origin
text), prequel adaptations ‘mean nothing’ until their ‘content’ is brought out
by the origin play’s opening scene.7 Likewise, but on another level, the open-
ing scene of Lear triggers the prequels’ existence; it is part of the ‘bringing out
of meaning’ completed by an active response of adaptation.
Paradoxically, this unique handling of time makes both plays (though
again on different levels) reasons and results, causes and effects, origins and
endings. King Lear is a textual precedent for Lear’s Daughters, i.e., a pre-text,
whereas Lear’s Daughters is an attempt to present the past of Lear, to fill in its
‘gaps’, i.e., a prequel. To illustrate it with very handy examples, King Lear is an
origin as Lear is to his daughters: every event and action of Lear’s Daughters
is in a way ‘genetically’ imprinted in the origin play as well. Lear’s Daughters,
however, behave as origins to King Lear, moulding it into being, creating its

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Annamária Fábián

8. As, for example, the character, instructing how it should be understood, similarly perhaps to the
recurring presence
of the word nothing
way Goneril, Regan and to some extent Cordelia turn into the ‘mothers’ and
is in Edward Bond’s rulers of Lear in Shakespeare’s drama.
Lear, or the constant Lear’s Daughters ‘takes its shape from the ‘gaps’ in Shakespeare’s King
Shakespeare-text
references in Barker’s Lear’ (Griffin and Aston 1991: 11) and therefore uses very little specific and
Seven Lears (e.g. direct textual references or ‘verbal echoes’. A very obvious textual reference
references like: is the use of the names of the characters and the direction of the plot itself:
‘Something rotten, can
you smell?’ [to Hamlet;] the prequel is pointing towards the Shakespeare story’s direction all along,
or: ‘... temper is as and arrives into the Shakespeare text in the end and therefore the play does
appropriate as bawling
at the weather and
not need more evident textual particles8 to refer to the Shakespeare text. It
vengeance as absurd as could be assumed that the text-body of Lear’s Daughters is virtually ‘free’ from
stabbing wind’ [to King Shakespeare, avoiding the direct references and quotations, and inventing
Lear’s storm scene]).
mainly new motives supporting and fitting into the Shakespearean frame, or
9. It is interesting to ask providing that very frame for the Shakespeare text. It is therefore independ-
whether it becomes an
inevitable reference ent from the Shakespeare text, and still, quite paradoxically by its nature as a
for the Lear-story in prequel, cannot get rid of it but with its mere existence becomes a reference
general, or, though to King Lear.9 As the words uttered in Lear’s Daughters are to be understood
lacking the textual
links, for Shakespeare’s as utterances before the opening scene of King Lear, they become effective on
King Lear specifically. all the utterances of Shakespeare’s characters. In one of his most prominent
I would be of the
opinion that as the
statements, Cavell asserts that for a particular utterance
Lear-story itself has
become symbiotic its being said then and there is as determinative of what it says as the
with the name of
Shakespeare and it is meanings of its individual words are.
virtually impossible to (107)
separate the authorial
presence/the name of
Shakespeare from the The prequel adaptations’ unique intensity lies in the fact that by their sole
story, consequently existence presented as prior to King Lear, they determine the ‘where’ and
any attempt to use/
interpret the Lear
especially the ‘when’ of the origin play. Thus, prequel characters do not even
story will necessarily have to reuse the certain words of Shakespeare, simply their position will
have to deal with have the potential to drastically reinterpret the meaning of each and every
Shakespeare’s. It is
interesting also to word uttered in the origin play.
think over whether
Lear’s Daughters
could be treated as Creating the father – the avoidance of character
a prequel to other
Lear-stories before ‘Lear I will be the patterne of all patience,
Shakespeare’s or, say,
Tate’s adaptation. Most
likely, we will have to I will say nothing’.
assume that it is not (III.2/1689)
conveniently possible
to do so, as they either
have different names Before starting to look into the prequel adaptation’s creative strategies
for different characters, concerning the character of Lear through Cavell’s essay, a very brief introduc-
or they lack the Fool,
or (as a very unlikely tion of the plot and characters of the prequel adaptation is needed. As it was
possibility for Cordelia referred to above, Lear’s Daughters does not investigate or ‘prepare’ any of the
in Lear’s Daughters)
they end happily.
Gloucester-plot, the political issues, the bond of service between Kent and
Lear, or that of love between the Fool and Lear. It focuses on the royal family,
provides a family history and presents the roots of the conflict and then the
open clash between the familial and the royal, the private (love) and the public
(duty). It is family as a context and home as a setting where all the partici-
pants of this conflict are (re)placed and (re)presented, and by this new context
and new setting their identities as they had been known by Shakespeare’s
text gain new dimensions and the transformed characters provide the most
important aspect of recompositon for the old play anew.

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 The art of avoidance

In Lear’s Daughters, the female characters are placed in the centre; the
focus from King Lear shifts to his three daughters, and therefore the patriar-
chal beginning and the male-dominated drama (mainly set in a female-ruled
kingdom) becomes a female-oriented and female-dominated drama, set in an
oppressive and doubtlessly patriarchal realm. The title defines the daughters
as Lear’s, that is, they seem to be inextricably bound to him (and with the
same gesture the text becomes also bound to its ancestor[s]). Paradoxically,
though, they are defined by Lear already in the title, yet the daughters in the
play are striving to be independent and to be able to define themselves with-
out Lear. Therefore, his character – not as a king but as a father – is deline-
ated in order to provide a radical rewrite for the character of King Lear in the
origin play. What the text of Shakespeare presents almost entirely from Lear’s
point of view (and it is especially true for the relationship of father and chil-
dren) here gains another perspective: by the daughters’ central role and their
comprehensive reflections, every action of every character is embedded into
a net of background information, is set into a new chain of cause and effect,
and by this alteration of perspective the origin play’s events and characters
(and especially Lear) accommodate to the postmodern feminist interpreta-
tion’s aims.
The first scene of Lear’s Daughters introduces Cordelia, Regan and Goneril;
they do not identify themselves by their love and relationship towards Lear,
but, as Fischlin and Fortier put it: ‘they gain identity not in relation to a partic-
ular hierarchy, but rather, from the distinctive features with which they are
identified’ (2000: 216), that is, Cordelia with speech and words, Regan by
touch and material and Goneril with sight and colours. Their monologues also
explicitly invoke the arts of writing, sculpture and painting, and the elements
of air, earth and water, respectively. They appear to be markedly different,
and not only Cordelia but the two elder sisters also gain certain distinctive
features, which create their own, separate identities; their ‘wicked sisters’
collective image is deconstructed right at the beginning.
The play is less active in action than in narration; the thoughts and experi-
ences of all the characters are often narrated and dialogues frequently involve
storytelling and recalling memories. Right after the introduction of the girls,
the first scene depicts the Nanny telling stories to the girls in the nursery.
This gives the play a palpable fairy-tale-like atmosphere; in fact, storytelling
becomes a symbolic act in the play, and tales become sources of reality to be
interpreted.

[…] people sometimes say that King Lear opens as a fairy tale opens.
But it doesn’t. It is not narrated, and the first characters we see are two
old courtiers discussing the event of the day. The element of fairy tale
then appears, centered in other characters […]
(86)

In Lear’s Daughters, the fairy-tale interpretation that Cavell claimed to be

untrue for the beginnings of Shakespeare’s Lear is highlighted and, indeed,
the play not only begins with this fairy tale feature, but the telling of tales
and trying to fathom the truth by them remains a key attribute to Lear’s
Daughters. The storyteller is almost exclusively the Nanny of the girls, whose
enigmatic figure is the holder of special knowledge. The fifth character of the
play, the Fool (who is not a newly introduced character to the origin play but
staged here in a profoundly refashioned manner), is also quite undefinable:

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Annamária Fábián

10. In fact, this is the with an emphasized androgynous character both sexes appear in/with the
interpretation Nahum
Tate sticks to when
figure, he or she acts both Lear and his Queen with expressive props (like a
he rewrites King Lear crown, a veil, etc.).
in 1670 producing a Lear does not personally appear onstage. He is reduced into a character in
regular restoration
tragicomedy of the stories of the girls, and a figure acted for the girls (who become audiences
Shakespeare’s and partners of the actor Fool this way), subject to an interpretation of both
‘unstrung’ and the Fool (the actor) and the daughters (the audience). With this method of
‘unpolished’ tragedy,
where the choleric expression, the figure of Lear is hidden, his person avoided and his authentic-
old man is coming ity and diversity is veiled. His presence is denied. Lear’s Daughters diminshes
to his senses and
is reconciled with
their ‘creator’ and fails to acknowledge him. To turn to Cavell’s reading:
the true and loving
daughter, who is to It is a question how acknowledgement is to be expressed, how we are
marry Edgar in the end;
but the only dramatic to put ourselves in another’s presence. […] We must learn to reveal
source of Shakespeare ourselves, to allow ourselves to be seen. When we do not, when we
mentioned above keep ourselves in the dark, the consequence is that we convert the other
treats Lear similarly.
into a character and make the world a stage for him.
(104)

In the prequel adaptation, it is Lear who is unacknowledged, being converted

into a character of a play: precisely because he has no real persona, he is
an interpretation of a character instead of a real character and as such cannot
even attempt to reveal himself. He is placed on a stage for the girls, and
on a sort of meta-stage for the audience. ‘The father’s material absence
from this scenario is one of the major ways in which the play rewrites
Shakespeare’s version of the story’, writes Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier
in their introduction to Lear’s Daughters, and they go on to add: ‘[t]he depth
of characterisation that Goneril, Regan and Cordelia receive […] along with
the focus they receive as staged characters, presents a radical alternative
to the way in which audiences have come to expect the telling of Lear’s
story […]’ (2000: 216).
This alteration alone would be substantial enough to flatten and simplify
Shakespeare’s Lear, but this is not the only way Lear’s Daughters recreate the
father figure. If we re-read Cavell’s argumentation about Lear’s motivations
and the tragedy’s triggering effects, we find that the prequel adaptation’s Lear
and, as he marches on into the origin play’s opening scene, Shakespeare’s
Lear as well is turned into a loud and unpleasant, insensitive and immoral,
conceited, degenerate man, a holder of immense destructive powers. There
have been interpretations of Lear as a character of great faults, but his diver-
sity and dignity has never been questioned; he was often referred to as the
simple choleric type usual in tragicomedies, staged by Shakespeare with
unusual richness of character.10 Cavell gives his interpretation after quoting
his predecessors:

The usual interpretations follow one of three main lines: Lear is senile;
Lear is puerile; Lear is not to be understood in natural terms, for the
whole scene has a fairy tale or ritualistic character.
(57)

All these interpretations try to comply with the expectations in connection to

Shakespeare: Lear has to emerge as a hero of a Shakespearean tragedy, and
as such has a positive, heroic character, though he has overtly and undoubt-
edly made big mistakes, but even so he remains a likeable persona, and the

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 The art of avoidance

audience can feel compassionate and desires his relief from pain and suffer-
ing. Cavell, however, proposes a different interpretation based on a deeply
psychological and language-philosophical approach:

[…] Lear’s behaviour in this scene is explained by – the tragedy begins

because of – the same motivation which manipulates the tragedy
throughout its course […]: by the attempt to avoid recognition, the
shame of exposure, the threat of self revelation.
(57)

He goes on to investigate the reasons motivating this avoidance of recogni-

tion, of the exposure of the self, and he has a longer argumentation about
how the feeling of shame is the trivial reason for Lear’s actions.

[…] [Shame] is the right candidate to serve as a motive. […] It is the

most isolating of feelings, the most comprehensible perhaps in idea, but
the most incomprehensible or incommunicable in fact. Shame […] is
the most primitive, the most private, of emotions, but it is also the most
primitive of social response […]:
(58)

Cavell makes Lear seen in a quite different shade; his Lear loses all the previ-
ous interpretations: the choleric, senile, puerile, or fairy-tale-like father. His
Lear is ashamed, and this feeling makes him fragile and unstable. Cavell
explicitly claims that it is a hypothesis he offers, and that according to this
hypothesis of shame,

[…] we need not assume that Lear is either incomprehensible or stupid

or congenitally arbitrary and inflexible and extreme in his conduct.
Shame itself is exactly arbitrary, inflexible, and extreme in its effect. It is
familiar to find that what mortifies one person, seems wholly unimpor-
tant to another.
(58)

Lear’s Daughters, however, are not so forgiving with Lear. The Lear they avoid
sight of is – by the effects he makes – depicted exactly as Cavell character-
izes the effects of the motivating shame: arbitrary, inflexible, extreme. More
importantly, Cavell outlines the importance of the family as a background for
this pernicious feeling of shame:

[…] shame is felt not only toward one’s own actions and one’s own
being, but the actions and the being of those with whom one is identi-
fied – fathers, daughters, wives […] , the beings whose self-revelations
reveal oneself. Families, any objects of one’s love and commitment,
ought to be the places where shame is overcome; but they are also the
place of its deepest manufacture, and one is then hostage to that power,
or fugitive.
(58)

In the prequel of Lear’s Daughters, as it was proposed above, the empha-

sis is not on the royal, but on the family. In Shakespeare’s Lear, the family
matters are not touched upon and family history is left intact, and apart

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Annamária Fábián

11. For a more detailed from faint hints and reader response speculations there is no information
discussion of the
matter, see Coppelia
about the childhood of the girls or the reasons why the bond of Lear and
Kahn (1986); Lynda Cordelia seems to be stronger than that between Lear and the other girls. We
E. Boose (1982), R. A. know nothing of Lear’s attachment to the princesses’ mother(s?) and even
Foakes’s introduction
to the Arden edition less about her death. The fact that there is no male heir is not something to
of Shakespeare’s King lament on but a fact resulting in the division of the kingdom. And this family
Lear (1997). business, so carefully avoided in Shakespeare, which should be ‘the place
where shame is overcome’ and can be the ‘place of [shame’s] deepest manu-
facture’, is centred and acted out and upon in the prequels. And – as it can
be expected – this royal family presented in Lear’s Daughters is not one where
the unconditional love of parents and children is able to offer a place where
shame is overcome, but with its lonely and oppressed daughters who reveal
their deepest thoughts and fears, tensions and private emotions, refusing to
be presented with Lear’ person, this family becomes the hotbed of ‘shame’s
deepest manufacture’.
The reason for Lear’s shame, what he is ashamed of, is a crucial issue here,
and Cavell concludes that in King Lear shame is the experience of unacceptable
love (67), and he also adds that

It can be said that what Lear is ashamed of is not his need for love and
his inability to return it, but the nature of his love for Cordelia. It is too
far of plain love of father and daughter. Even if we resist seeing in it the
love of lovers, it is at least incompatible with the idea of her having any
(other) lover.
(70)

The feminist interpretations of King Lear from the eighties, however, did not
resist reading a love of lovers, or more precisely a relationship based on sexual
desire between Lear and Cordelia. The resistance Cavell talks about was
mainly due to the overwhelming critical respect for the glory and greatness of
Shakespeare and his work, and the effort to read sense and heroism into each
tragedy he wrote, with which an incestuous relationship could not be toler-
ated; besides, King Lear obviously cannot be said to treat the incest motive
overtly. However, the gradual appearance and augmentation of psychoanalyt-
ical and feminist readings undermined this cautious approach avoiding inter-
pretations of King Lear based on the possibilities of incest,11 sex and lust. It is
no surprise, therefore, that Lear’s Daughters also counts with these possibili-
ties. Cavell then goes on to add (without any trace of reproach or disapproval,
but with sensible and to the point argumentation):

I do not wish to suggest that ‘avoidance of love’ and ‘avoidance of a

particular kind of love’ are alternative hypotheses about this play. On
the contrary, they seem to me to interpret one another. Avoidance of
love is always, or always begins as, and avoidance of a particular kind
of love: Human beings do not just naturally not love, they learn not to.
And our lives begin by having to accept under the name of love what-
ever closeness is offered, and by then having to forgo its object. And
the avoidance of a particular love, or the acceptance of it, will spread to
every other; every love, in acceptance or rejection, is mirrored in every
other. It is part of the miracle of the vision in King Lear to bring this
before us, so that we do not care whether the kind of love felt between
these two is forbidden according to humanity’s lights. We care whether

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 The art of avoidance

love is or is not altogether forbidden to us, whether we may not alto- 12. ‘Cordelia not want to
be Daddy’s girl’, (Lear’s
gether be incapable of it … Daughters: 227)
(72)
He took me down
all these corridors,
The prequel adaptation goes a step further than this as there is an uneasy I could hardly keep
feeling emerging throughout the play, leading to a possible explanation for up and then […] he
opened a door and
Cordelia to remain the single daughter for Lear, namely, that the bond between pushed me inside.
them – as opposed to the bond of nature that Gloucester refers to – can be And the room was
interpreted as most unnatural, taken into consideration that Lear’s behaviour full of gold. […] He
shut the door and
towards Cordelia is to be understood in terms of child abuse and incest. Scene bent down to me
10 of the play gives an ambiguous and rather peculiar dialogue of the Fool and whispered,
‘When you are
(Lear) and Cordelia, where the ‘spinning for Daddy’ motif and the ‘not want to Queen, this will be
be Daddy’s girl’ line can support the possibility of sexual relationship involved yours. This will be
and thus an unnatural and uncanny tie between father and daughter might our secret – just
you and me – and
also be indicated here. Moreover, it is not exclusively Cordelia who is involved you mustn’t tell.’
in this matter, as Goneril also recalls a childhood memory quite obviously And then he put
hinting the unnatural sexual relations of Lear towards his daughter.12 Not only his hand (silence)
on my shoulder.
does the possibility of an incestuous relationship in the background provide a I never did tell
severely different interpretation for Cordelia’s reasons to remain the only one anyone.
(Lear’s Daughters:
for Lear, but – and more importantly – Lear is pushed onto the deepest levels 228)
of amorality, and at this very point he is manifestly deconstructed to become a
13. King Lear II. 4. 1408–10:
base character to be admitted into the Shakespearean drama as well. ‘Regan, I think you are.
Lear’s character is reintroduced in yet another function, and that reinter- I know what reason/I
pretation is formulated by the missing wife/mother figure, who is so care- have to think so, if
thou should’st not be
fully avoided in the origin play, and whose absence triggers the question of glad,/I would divorce
Harold Bloom: ‘Are Shakespeare’s perspectives in King Lear incurably male?’ me from thy Mother’s
He then adds: ‘what would Shakespeare have done with Queen Lear? […] Tomb,/Sepulchring
an Adultresse’ (My
Wisely she is deceased before the play opens […]’ (1999: 475). Janet Adelman footnote, F.A.).
also focuses on the absent queen in her book on the ‘motherless’ nature of
Shakespeare’s plays: ‘King Lear has no wife, his daughters no mother; nor,
apparently, have they ever had one: Queen Lear goes unmentioned, except
for those characteristic moments when Lear invokes her13 to cast doubt on
his paternity […]’ (1992: 104). Lear’s Daughters presents a mother, a Queen,
and her role is mainly to provide a counterpart of the father in relation to the
girls (a loving but weak and volatile mother) and a wife to Lear, an oppressed,
powerless and sick woman under the rule (and, in a constant reference for
their struggle for a male heir, the weighty body of) of the dominant Lear. It is
quite compelling, though, that this queen does not have a real persona either:
she is also acted out by the Fool, like Lear. With this perception, she becomes
a mirror image for the King, and an equal to him, and her character does not
overshadow the girls; she remains opaque and her gap in King Lear is there-
fore just partly filled. Her main role seems to be to provide the reading of the
husband Lear. If Lear as a father is deconstructed into an immoral anti-hero,
it is even more prominently happening for Lear the husband. Lear’s wife is
doomed to die, out of the origin play’s potentials:

[a character] is fixed in the present,

(106)

says Cavell, and taken his sentence to the figure of the Queen, we find that
she is fixedly absent, and referred to as dead in Shakespeare’s play. She
necessarily has to die in the prequel as well. However, as there is virtually

121
Annamária Fábián
14. King Lear I. 4. 221–22.
122
no information about her in the origin play, it is the prequel adaptation’s
sovereign decision to choose the circumstances and reasons for her death.
Quite predictably, in the prequel adaptation the cause of her death can be
traced back to Lear, who is projected as the insensitive, violent and vulgar
husband, whose maniac attempts to produce a male heir prove to be fatal for
the queen (as she apparently dies of her fourth miscarriage). All the back-
ground information on their relationship is again provided by the Nanny, who
is witness to the whole length and all the qualities of the royal marriage, and
predicts something similar to the daughters themselves.
Lear’s Daughters rewrite their origin, Lear, and their origins, King Lear. To
put it simply, this new figure of Lear lacks any trace of sensitivity and beauty,
and contradicts Shakespeare’s Lear and his versatility and subtlety. With
this new light of interpretation cast upon the origin play, the adaptation’s
father and husband figure becomes ‘Lear’s shadow’, that is a colourless, dark
figure rooting in the Shakespearean character, following it everywhere. The
Shakespearean question of Lear ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’14 is of
great importance in Cavell’s essay as well.
… the answer to Lear’s question is held in the inescapable Lear which
is now obscure and obscuring, and in the inescapable Lear which is
projected upon the world, and that Lear is double and has a double.
(79)
To see the prequel adaptation’s Lear as a doubling of Lear as we had perceived
him in Shakespeare’s play seems to be a convenient way of approach and if –
as Cavell goes on to add – ‘doubling sets a task, of discovery, of acknowledge-
ment’ (79), then for the readers and the audiences of this new double Lear the
task of discovery is easier than that of acknowledgement. The prequel Lear
lacks the dignity, the mystery and the likeability of Shakespeare’s Lear, and
by preceding him in the story-line the prequel Lear sets the Shakespearean
figure’s interpretation onto a specific orbit, and quite provokingly it is precisely
his (Cavellian) doubleness, his integrity and his complexity within the origin
play that is lost.
The unpleasant, lustful and omnipotent man becomes an antithesis of
all the surrounding women living under his oppression, but these female
figures find their own definitions precisely by their marked difference,
by their isolation from Lear, and find their ways out of their oppression
through these new definitions: the ways that are leading to the women
of Shakespeare’s play, where – quite paradoxically – Goneril and Regan
will take after their prequel-made, monstrous father to the extremes. Their
hunger for power, their oppressive nature and their lust become moti-
vated and therefore more acceptable after the supportive presence of the
prequel.
Conclusion
As it was presented above illustrated by the reinterpretative involvement of
Stanley Cavell’s essay, the avoidance of love and self-recognition of Lear
can be mirrored onto Lear’s Daughters, a prequel adaptation for King Lear.
This prequel takes its shape by the creative act of conscious avoidance, as it
avoids not only the person of Shakespeare (and the traditional author func-
tion as it is) and the text of the origin play, but also and most importantly
 The art of avoidance

it avoids the presence, the complexity and versatility of Shakespeare’s Lear-

character. This multiple act of avoidance becomes a creative potential and
provokes new and intriguing interpretations to King Lear, but does it quite
drastically: the new adaptation’s manifestation as the backstory of King
Lear produces a chain of causes and effects, and with this gesture it aims
to narrow down the number of possible readings of the origin play. The
motivations provided are purging the female roles of their arbitrariness and
degrading the king’s character into a flat and simple type. To conclude our
reading with Cavell,

[…] avoidance of the presence of others is not blindness or deafness to

their claim upon us; it is as conclusive an acknowledgement that they
are present as murdering them would be.
(103)

It seems then that the prequel chooses to avoid certain substantial aspects of
King Lear and various characteristics of the character King Lear in order to
present a new text and a new persona suitable for the feminist approach, and
thus takes its shape from the avoiding, the ‘murdering’ of these aspects. At
the same time, paradoxically, this very avoidance of the origins by the prequel
also defines and acknowledges the existence of the author, the text and the
character of Lear experienced as gaps within the prequel, and involves them
over and over again in the interpreting process.

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Suggested citation
Fábián, A. (2013), ‘The art of avoidance: Avoidance as a means of (re)creation
in a prequel adaptation to Shakespeare’s King Lear’, Journal of Adaptation
in Film & Performance 6: 2, pp. 109–124, doi: 10.1386/jafp.6.2.109_1

Contributor details
Annamária Fábián holds M.A.s in English and Hungarian language and liter-
ature from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. She gained her Ph.D. in 2013.
Her recent research interests include adaptation theory and especially the
prequel adaptations to Shakespeare’s King Lear.
Contact: ELTE, School of English and American Studies, 1088 Budapest, 
Rákóczi út 5., Hungary.
E-mail: fabiannamaria@gmail.com

Annamária Fábián has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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