Staging Cordelia: Drama and Theatre -- Mimetic Theory and Literary Study

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Date Posted: 15:05:15 01/28/08 Mon
Author: CS Holden
Subject: Staging Cordelia: Drama and Theatre

Our discussion of Cordelia as a participant in the system was all well and good, but I'm running into a brick wall.

How can you stage such a thing?

Let me think this out a little. I know we're looking at dramatic works primarily as literature, but let's face it, there's a reason many of the works in this course come from the theatre. Theatre itself is inherently mimetic, on many levels, Girardian as well as Aristotelian. Good theatre makes strong use of the kind of mimetic desire we're talking about in this class.

But my real point is, in all this in-depth literary analysis, we risk looking at the text too much and forgetting that it is meant to be performed. (This is a tension a lot for me, being a theatre and English major, and studying many of the same plays through different eyes.) I don't think we've quite made that error, but I wonder if we're close.

I watched a few versions of "Lear" when I reread it to get a sense of how this all "plays out" with performers, and one thing I noticed is that the opening scene almost always sequesters Cordelia, spatially. She's usually thrown into the center of the circle of vipers, alone and completely victimized by virtue of her location on the set, "on the spot" before her father. She resembles a lone firing squad victim against a wall. In many versions, she's even dressed differently from Goneril and Regan, and is the only pretty daughter. (Hmmm...) That's the temptation, of course, to remove her completely from her sisters, to say, "She is outside their system, she is different." But if she's a fellow participant in the game her sisters play, how should that be staged, then?

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Replies:

Re: Staging Cordelia: Drama and Theatre -- Caitlin, 17:40:47 01/28/08 Mon