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A Candle of Darkness: Multiplied Deixis in Roberto Ciulli’s King Lear

As Bernard McElroy long ago observed,1 if he had said simply, “That’s true,” or “That’s not true,” there would be nothing unusual in this utterance; but he says “and that’s true too.” In other words, he equates two mutually exclusive options. It is impossible both to “rot even here,” and also, in the awareness that the time has not yet come, to face “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” It is, I suppose, not without significance that the words “and that’s true too” are the last that Gloucester utters in the play. (The Fool, in turn, will say, equally paradoxically, as he departs from the text, that he will “go to bed at noon.”)2 In Roberto Ciulli’s recent production of King Lear (seen at the XI International Shakespeare Festival in Gdańsk, Teatr Wybrzeże, August 2007), the ambiguities of language are deepened by the fact that each of the actors performing on stage impersonates at least two distinct fictional figures.3 One of these figures is not Shakespearean at all, and for that reason, and also because only Shakespeare’s text is used throughout, what is true for one of the figures in its specific context is