‘This great stage of fools’: Martha Graham’s dance ‘Notes for a Study of Lear’

Abstract

The Notebooks of Martha is a set of notes Graham wrote between the late 1940s and the 1960s. They include quotations from various subjects such as literature, mythology and art. Fifteen pages are dedicated to William Shakespeare’s King Lear, as Graham had decided to choreograph a work on this famous tragedy, titled The Eye of Anguish. Graham did not perform in it and created the dance for her partner on stage and then husband Erick Hawkins. The notes present an interesting layout, have no date and are characterized by a fascinating question in regard to the relationship between quotations from the play and Graham’s comments. The notes address various topics, but one is particularly striking, that is the Fool image. The Fool is a complex character in King Lear and, at one point, Graham quotes Lear’s famous line ‘when we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools’. What is her relationship to the ‘stage of fools?’ How does she elaborate her notes on the actual choreography? In this study, I intend to explore the notes following three aspects: the notes as such, their layout, date and quotation–non quotation arrangement; the stage-Fool binomial and how it reverberates across Graham’s work; the final notes on the choreography. The methodological tools used are those of dance and literary studies and cultural history.