[Gordon Bottomley]
King Lear's Wife[1]
| To T.S.M. |
DRAMATIS PERSONÆ:
| LEAR | King of Britain |
| HYGD | his Queen |
| GONERIL | daughter to King Lear |
| CORDEIL | daughter to King Lear |
| GORMFLAITH | waiting-woman to Queen Hygd |
| MERRYN | waiting-woman to Queen Hygd |
| A PHYSICIAN | |
| TWO ELDERLY WOMEN |
The scene is a bedchamber in a one-storied house. The walls consist of a few courses of huge irregular boulders roughly squared and fitted together; a thatched roof rises steeply from the back wall. In the centre of the back wall is a doorway opening on a garden and covered by two leather curtains; the chamber is partially hung with similar hangings stitched with bright wools. There is a small window on each side of this door.
Toward the front a bed stands with its head against the right wall; it has thin leather curtains hung by thongs and drawn back. Farther forward a rich robe and a crown hang on a peg in the same wall. There is a second door beyond the bed, and between this and the bed's head stands a small table with a bronze lamp and a bronze cup on it. Queen HYGD, an emaciated woman, is asleep in the bed; her plenteous black hair, veined with silver, spreads over the pillow. Her waiting-woman, MERRYN, middle-aged and hard-featured, sits watching her in a chair on the farther side of the bed. The light of early morning fills the room.
Merryn:
Many, many must die who long to live,
Yet this one cannot die who longs to die:
Even her sleep, come now at last, thwarts death,
Although sleep lures us all half way to death....
I could not sit beside her every night
If I believed that I might suffer so:
I am sure I am not made to be diseased,
I feel there is no malady can touch me —
Save the red cancer, growing where it will.