In One Person

hero’s part”—not to mention that Edgar is later disguised as Poor Tom, so that Kittredge had essentially been given “a dual role”—Martha Hadley wanted to know how closely I’d looked over my lines. Given that my number of
unpronounceables
was growing , did I foresee that the Fool presented me with any vocabulary issues? Was Mrs. Hadley hinting that my pronunciation problems could excuse me from the play?
    “What are you getting at?” I asked her. “You think I can’t handle ‘cutpurses’ or ‘courtesan,’ or are you worried that ‘codpiece’ will throw me for a loop—just because of the
whatchamacallit
the codpiece covers, or because I have trouble with the word for the
whatchamacallit
itself?”
    “Don’t be defensive, Billy,” Martha Hadley said.
    “Or was it the ‘arrant whore’ combination that you thought might trip me up?” I asked her. “Or maybe ‘coxcomb’—either the singular or the plural, or both!”
    “Calm down, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley said. “We’re both upset about Kittredge.”
    “Kittredge had the last lines in
Twelfth Night
!” I cried. “Now Richard gives him the last lines again! We have to hear
Kittredge
say, ‘The weight of this sad time we must obey: / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.’ ”
    “‘The oldest hath borne most,’” Kittredge-as-Edgar continues.
    In the story of
King Lear
—given what happens to Lear, not to mention the blinding of Gloucester (Richard had cast himself as Gloucester)—this is certainly true. But when Edgar ends the play by declaring that “we that are young / Shall never see so much nor live so long”—well, I don’t know if that is
universally
true.
    Do I dispute the concluding wisdom of this great play because I can’t distinguish Edgar from Kittredge? Can
anyone
(even Shakespeare) know how future generations will or will not
suffer
?
    “Richard is doing what’s best for the play, Billy,” Martha Hadley told me. “Richard isn’t rewarding Kittredge for seducing Elaine.” Yet it somehow seemed that way to me. Why give Kittredge as good a part as Edgar, who is later disguised as Poor Tom? After what had happened in
Twelfth Night
, why did Richard have to give Kittredge a role in
King Lear
at all? I wanted out of the play—being, or not being, Lear’s Fool wasn’t the issue.
    “Just tell Richard you don’t want to be around Kittredge, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley said to me. “Richard will understand.”
    I couldn’t tell Martha Hadley that I also didn’t want to be around Richard. And what point was there, in this production of
King Lear
, to observe my mother’s expression when she watched her father onstage as a woman? Grandpa Harry was cast as Goneril, Lear’s eldest daughter; Goneril is such a horrid daughter, why wouldn’t my mom look at
anyone
playing Goneril with the utmost disapproval? (Aunt Muriel was Regan, Lear’s other awful daughter; I assumed that my mother would glower at her sister, Muriel, too.)
    It wasn’t only because of Kittredge that I wanted nothing to do with this
King Lear
. I had no heart to see Uncle Bob fall short in the leading-man department, for the good-hearted Bob—
Squash Ball
Bob, Kittredge called him—was cast as King Lear. That Bob lacked a tragic dimension seemed obvious, if not to Richard Abbott; perhaps Richard pitied Bob,
and
found him tragic, because Bob was (tragically) married to Muriel.
    It was Bob’s body that was all wrong—or was it his head? Bob’s body was big, and athletically robust; compared to his body, Bob’s head seemed too small, and improbably round—a squash ball lost between two hulking shoulders. Uncle Bob was both too good-natured and too strong-looking to be Lear.
    It is relatively early in the play (act 1, scene 4) when Bob-as-Lear bellows, “‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ ”
    Who could forget how Lear’s Fool answers the king? But I did; I forgot that I even had a line. “‘Who is it that can tell me who I am,’
Bill?
” Richard Abbott asked me.
    “It’s your line, Nymph,” Kittredge whispered to me. “I had anticipated that you might have a little trouble with it.” Everyone waited while I found the Fool’s line. At first, I wasn’t even aware of the pronunciation problem; my difficulty in saying this word was so recent that I hadn’t noticed it, nor had Martha Hadley. But Kittredge, clearly, had detected the potential unpronounceable. “Let’s hear you say it, Nymph,” Kittredge said.