King Lear’s Mute

ABSTRACT: King Lear’s Mute re-imagines Shakespeare’s character Cordelia in exile as a speech-suffering, breathless musician. Following a disastrous love test, she ekes out her ponderous isolation within a sound studio, always live 'on air', but her notes, and her words, exhausted. The piece takes its cue from her 'What shall Cordelia speak?', and her ‘Nothing, my Lord', a response that signals a distrust of that 'glib and oily art / to speak and purpose not’ (1.i.226).

Narrated in part by a trumpet mute, and by the poetic commentary of the hectic gadfly, Lear's Fool, writer and poet-in-the-theatre Rupert Smith's polyphonic piece foregrounds a dystopian remythologising of King Lear's representation of nothing that resides somewhere between breath and being; its lifting off the page into orality provides a platform for 'the paradox of this Nothing which is to manifest itself, to explode in signs, in words, in gestures.' (Michel Foucault)

Rupert Smith is an AHRC funded Creative Writing PhD student at Lancaster University. His hybrid project 'Tract' is written within the cracks of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Its narrative is fascinated by intersections between the environmental humanities, religion, exile and the self, whilst also exploring the limits of the genre-fluid novel as a container for poetics. Versions of 'Tract' have been published and performed at Yale, Lancaster University, All Borders Blur, and at The Radical Creative Writing Symposium, University of Salford.