George Orwell

LEAR, TOLSTOY AND THE FOOL (1947)

Tolstoy’s pamphlets are the least-known part of his work, and his attack on Shakespeare * is not even an easy document to get hold of, at any rate in an English translation. Perhaps, therefore, it will be useful if I give a summary of the pamphlet before trying to discuss it.

* SHAKESPEARE AND THE DRAMA. Written about 1903 as an introduction to another pamphlet, SHAKESPEARE AND THE WORKING CLASSES, by Ernest Crosby. (Author’s footnote)

Tolstoy begins by saying that throughout life Shakespeare has aroused in him “an irresistible repulsion and tedium”. Conscious that the opinion of the civilized world is against him, he has made one attempt after another on Shakespeare’s works, reading and re-reading them in Russian, English and German; but “I invariably underwent the same feelings; repulsion, weariness and bewilderment”. Now, at the age of seventy-five, he has once again re-read the entire works of Shakespeare, including the historical plays, and

I have felt with an even greater force, the same feelings—this time, however, not of bewilderment, but of firm, indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent merits—thereby distorting their aesthetic and ethical understanding—is a great evil, as is every untruth.

Shakespeare, Tolstoy adds, is not merely no genius, but is not even “an average author”, and in order to demonstrate this fact he will examine KING LEAR, which, as he is able to show by quotations from Hazlitt, Brandes and others, has been extravagantly praised and can be taken as an example of Shakespeare’s best work.

Tolstoy then makes a sort of exposition of the plot of KING LEAR, finding it at every step to be stupid, verbose, unnatural, unintelligible, bombastic, vulgar, tedious and full of incredible events, “wild ravings”, “mirthless jokes”, anachronisms, irrelevaricies, obscenities, worn-out stage conventions and other faults both moral and aesthetic. LEAR is, in any case, a plagiarism of an earlier and much better play, KING LEIR, by an unknown author, which Shakespeare stole and then ruined. It is worth quoting a specimen paragraph to illustrate the manner in which Tolstoy goes to work. Act III, Scene 2 (in which Lear, Kent and the Fool are together in the storm) is summarized thus:

Lear walks about the heath and says word which are meant to express his despair: he desires that the winds should blow so hard that they (the winds) should crack their cheeks and that the rain should fiood everything, that lightning should singe his white bead, and the thunder flatten the world and destroy all (...)

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