Cordelia

Now for something a little different

I really wanted to keep my shoes on.

That’s the thing I remember most, staging a production of King Lear with my friends in a basement in New York City. I hadn’t wanted to play Cordelia in the first place—anything else, really, I’d thought I’d managed to swing Kent—but that’s just how the cards fell out, and it was just for fun anyway, so there I was being carried onstage, dead, and I really just wanted to not be barefoot.

I tried just wearing my shoes the first dress rehearsal run, thinking maybe the director wouldn’t even notice. But obviously if I was thinking about it, so was she, and that was the first note: “Can you take your shoes off in the last scene?”

Given that playing Cordelia is, fundamentally, extremely boring—you do nothing for three full acts, and we can do a different post about why the theory that Cordelia and the Fool maybe were double-cast is wrong—I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could tell her story as something I believed in. I found a gold and black brocade dress reminiscent of armor (obviously we didn’t have the budget for armor, we were doing a play for free in a basement). I leaned hard into every scrap of strength and defiance. But she still ends up dead in her father’s arms at the end of the day.

And that was the part I hadn’t expected, one of those material realities that doesn’t sink in until you’re seeing it—and especially until you’re doing it: Cordelia lies there for a long time. She’s carried and shaken and wept over, and it’s profoundly dehumanizing and strange. You’re a prop. You have to make sure you don’t breathe in a way anyone can see. You need to make yourself nothing.

I’d actually had the same realization twice before, playing Hero in Much Ado About Nothing and playing Juliet. They both just lie there, endlessly, while people talk about them and shout over them and weep on them. It’s awkward and strange and vulnerable—but they both get up at the end. Juliet dies again, true, but it’s by her own hand, and the feeling of exposure, of her body laid out on display for everyone to see and speculate about, is very different at the end of the play than it is when she’s found apparently dead in her bed. There’s a calm and decorum to the final moments of Romeo and Juliet, as if the bodies we see are somehow already not corpses, but the monument their parents promise to build.

Hero gets up too, of course, and finally gets to speak for herself, if a little more briefly than Juliet. Cordelia never gets up.

As a scholar and dramaturg, I can recognize intellectually the trick at play here: if you bring on a body played by an actor, especially one that has been killed offstage, then of course there’s a part of you that expects that body to get up. Why drag her on otherwise, rather than narrate her death (as happens with Goneril and Regan), or show it in tableau, where it’s far easier for the actor to remain convincingly still and pleasingly arranged? Shakespeare doesn’t tend to show you the body unless something’s going to happen to or with it: he shows you coffins instead. He wants you to think about this, to think about his previous not-quite-dead girls, and hope.

This is a perfect distillation of King Lear’s tragedy: the extinguishing of hope. The utter bleakness, the snuffing out of every light. Shakespeare takes the audience along with Lear on his final moments of hope that he has seen Cordelia move, live, breathe—maybe, we can think, this is like Juliet, the tragedy of awakening an instant too late for the one she loves. But she doesn’t. She’s just a body. It’s a masterful use of the realities of theatre to strengthen the story, to bring the audience along and make them feel what the characters are feeling.

As an actor, I hated it. This feels too on the nose, but I swear it’s true: during one early dress rehearsal (after the shoes were off), everyone made fun of me because I kept fidgeting in death. I was completely convinced that my skirt had ridden up and I was flashing everybody. It hadn’t, I wasn’t, they told me after—but in the moment, I was certain, and kept trying to find subtle ways to adjust myself. I was convinced I was exposed.

And, of course, I was. There’s nothing for an actor playing a dead body to do except be displayed, looked at. It begs scrutiny, both from the characters in the play itself, of the dead character—“Look, look!”—and by the audience, of the actor: Is she breathing? Did she move, just a little?

So my brain settled, not quite consciously, on the shoes. Maybe wearing them would imply some dignity in her death: that she’d mounted the scaffold fully dressed, fully armed. That she wasn’t just dragged out and hanged, a helpless victim, already just a body. Maybe it would just be one little bit of exposure less, covering up one small piece of intimacy, like tugging down my dress to make sure the audience couldn’t see anything I didn’t want them to.

But that’s the point, right? Cordelia never gets what she wants, she never has and never can. The shoes stayed off.

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