Rupert Smith

Lancaster University

Ruin'd Pieces of Nature: Eden Sank to Grief in King Lear



Biography

Rupert Smith is a Creative Writing PhD student at Lancaster University, UK. His research project is both an experimental hybrid novel, writing within the cracks of King Lear, and an investigation into the complexities of genre- fluid fiction as a container for poetics. An actor and poet, his remit extends to orality: making the written word performative by embracing the themes of disappearance, speech, the self, and food scarcity. His solo show, the spoken word lament 'The Pit Ponies' Penultimate Life Drawing Class' was short-listed for a creative sustainability award at the Edinburgh Festival in 2017.

Paper Abstract

'How shall your houseless heads and your unfed sides (...) defend you/from seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en too little care of this.' (King Lear 3.iv.30-33) This howl from an unaccommodated monarch denuded of sustenance, clothing and property, is heard from the eye of a metaphorical storm amidst the wastelands of poetic madness. It signals the briefest assent to the consequences of environmental unpredictability intensified by the court's utilitarian mindset concerning nature and the land. This 'contending with the fretful elements' (3.i.5-7), according to Jayne Elizabeth Archer, highlights Shakespeare's complex and nuanced response to failed harvests and fears of famine, as well as a radical decentering of terrain both geographical and personal. 'Edgar I nothing am' (2.ii.192) prompts Simon Estok's assertion that Lear's universe is a 'space of nothing' which divests all disguised and disenfranchised within it of identity, language and selfhood. This creative-critical practice paper by an award-winning AHRC funded writer will probe the methodology of New Historicism by delving between the cracks of King Lear to give voice to an experimental, genre-bending lament: Tract. Liturgist and contemporary theologian Cole Arthur Riley writes that 'there is no such thing as a lone wail'; this paper asks to what extent is Lear's cri de coeur a polyphonic 'psalm of disorientation' accenting 'the religious dimensions of loss', and a reminder that 'we have a personal stake in public events'? (Walter Brueggemann). With its focus on a location as far as possible from Lear's court, Tract is a novelistic, dystopian re-framing of an incident early in Act One - the conjoined disappearances of the banished Cordelia and of the Fool. Their hybrid and splintered narrative ushers into hopeful conversation the displaced elements of a troubled earth - 'We have seen the best of our time' (I.ii.114).