Abstract
This chapter explores how Succession serialises the dramatic starting point of Shakespeare’s tragedy for incessant reprisals of the succession crisis, thus expanding King Lear’s own dramaturgical seriality. Recasting Shakespeare’s royal family as the Roy family, owners of a global media conglomerate, Succession reimagines Lear’s crisis of sovereignty as a crisis of democracy. Succession makes visible particular features of Lear, such as a focus on games and contests and the tense interplay of marriage and succession, all of which are characterised by unwelcome returns of the predecessor. The crisis of inheritance has meta-adaptational potential and raises the question of how Succession as the illegitimate child or unannounced successor of King Lear behaves towards its paternal predecessor.
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Notes
- 1.
Critics have long argued that the Gloucester plot “express[es] a further aspect of the Lear experience”, which in Succession is reintegrated into the Lear storyline (Knights 1959, 66). Even though the series introduces two minor characters who partly take over the functions of Edgar as the seductive adulterer (Shiv’s lover Nate) and the underestimated ‘bastard’ son who might turn out to be a dangerous competitor (Amir, Marcia’s son from a former relationship), the family dynamics of sibling competition are mainly played out in the relations between Logan’s ‘legitimate’ children.
- 2.
As Parker has pointed out in her argument about the ‘pre-post-erous’ in Shakespeare, “Radical attacks on primogeniture such as Ap-Roberts’s frequently reprinted The Younger Brother his Apologie challenged the principle of temporal priority as the law of God, in a rallying cry that reminded its readers that, by the strict law of primogeniture or the ‘next in Blood,’ ‘Adams Inheritance’ should have gone to Cain” (1996, 26). For a reading of “Cordelia as a figurative younger son” in the context of the primogeniture question in early modern England, see Cooley (2008, 339).
- 3.
As McLuskie has put it, “[t]he psychological realism of the dramatic writing and the manipulation of the point of view forge the bonds between Lear as a complex character and the sympathies of the audience” (1996, 141).
- 4.
The AT&T and Time Warner merger raised antitrust concerns just as Waystar Royco’s buying of local TV stations in Succession does.
- 5.
Brian Sheerin argues that the treatise, like other radical texts by persecuted Huguenots, was widely circulated in England by the mid-1580s (2013, 797).
- 6.
This is also true for the ‘national home’ in both King Lear and Succession. As Linda Woodbridge notes, “King Lear drains all sense of home out of England” (2001, 208). Likewise, Logan Roy has left both his birthplace of Scotland and the country where he grew up, Canada, behind. He describes his attachment to his new home country, the US, as an appreciation of its “mercilessness” (1.9.54), hardly a homely notion of national belonging.
- 7.
Cf. also Adelman’s association of the “wetness of the storm” with “sexual wetness, a monstrous spilling of germens” (1992, 111).
- 8.
See Höfele for a reading of Gloucester’s torture as parallel to bear-baiting (2011, 208–209).
- 9.
The scene is also an intertextual reference to Ulysses and its morphing of sailors into swine. Before the game, Logan has given an expensive watch to Frank as a gesture of reconciliation; it features two lines from Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”: “Some work of noble note, may yet be done, / Not unbecoming men who strove with Gods” (Succession 2.3.20). The engraving demonstrates how Roy views literature, namely, merely to provide motivational lines for business endeavours.
- 10.
In contrast to the father’s pivotal role, “[t]he mother of the bride is a wholly excluded figure […]. Only the father must act out, must dramatize his loss before the audience of the community” (Boose 1982, 327). Succession explicitly comments on this marginalisation when Shiv’s mother is concerned that she will be overshadowed by the arrival of her ex-husband.
- 11.
Disputing his strategy with his team, Logan’s disinterest in his children is emphasised. When his PR advisor says “We always pushed that you are a good dad”, he asks for the reason and is taken aback by the answer “Well, because you are a good dad” (1.9.16).
- 12.
Warner’s production was itself a successor of the highly successful collaboration with Cox in the title role of Titus Andronicus two years earlier, and Cox has drawn attention to Titus as predecessor of Shakespeare’s later plays, including King Lear. “Shakespeare tries out a lot of ideas in Titus Andronicus that he later develops in other plays, like Othello , like Lear, like Coriolanus .”; “I reiterate: King Lear, Coriolanus , Othello , Macbeth , every single play is in that play” (2010, 3; 12).
- 13.
Parker comments, “As a reversal of priority, precedence, and ordered sequence, the preposterous also disrupts the linear orders of succession and following” (1996, 21, see also 22 for brief remarks about King Lear).
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Wald, C. (2020). King Lear and Succession: Returns of the Predecessor. In: Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in Complex TV . Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46851-4_3
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