ABSTRACT
Perhaps one reason why King Lear has been mistaken for an unactable play is that it is so nearly an unreadable play: taken passage by passage, it is so flat and grey that the better one knows it the more one feels on reopening its pages that this is almost “a tragedy complete in all but words”; the style alone might lead one to suppose that what happens in King Lear happens in some realm of the imagination beyond ear and eye. The opening scene makes it abundantly clear that the deepest feelings do not run out into words. Next, the glib and free-thinking Bastard expresses in soliloquy his rejection of the meanings others attach to words and public forms, and goes on to show how he can manipulate them to betray. If the problem is seen in these terms, a technique of montage seems the obvious solution.
