More on the final project and a bit on King Lear and biology

Hey, sorry for not posting this on time again, I'm going to really try and commit to putting my posts together the night before so that I'm SURE that I will post on time. Sorry for the inconvenience and the inconsistency.




So seeing the sound booth yesterday was VERY exciting! I reserved it for this evening so that I can tinker around with the hardware and whatnot in it and figure out how everything works. But there's definitely some hard-core awesome microphones. The major thing is just figuring out how to turn everything on. Once I can do that, the sound should be golden. I also think I'll record a few things and play around with various effects on human voices, so stay tuned for some fun samples on Friday.



Also, our rough cut in the googledoc posted here is finished. Thursday in class, we'll be going over the whole thing, reading through and getting the general feel of the script, possibly do some more cutting, possibly put in more lines.

Children betraying the father is a major theme throughout King Lear, seen both in Gloucester's sons and Lear's daughters. There is a very distinct biological, hormonal bond that ties the father to the child's well-being during gestation. In fact, some sources, like this article, say that the hormonal change causes parenting behavior. Then when the children are born, they form an instant tie with their mother and father, who provide social acceptance and emotional nourishment as well as food and shelter. Then as the child grows older, they can find social acceptance and emotional fulfillment elsewhere, illustrated in Cordelia's line, "Why have my sister's husbands, if they say/ They love you all?" Lear's daughters have by this point found love outside of him and no longer need him, while Lear has given everything to his daughters and is now reliant upon them for his well-being. The parental-child role here has been flip-flopped, and without that spike in hormones, his daughters feel very little obligation to actually take care of Lear, especially when he continues to treat them like his children.

Then in Gloucester's case, he has a rather good relationship with Edgar, who greatly loves his father and, along with Cordelia, is one of the only characters that actually exhibits love for his parent. However, Edmund, whose major difference from Edgar is the identity of his mother. Yet this difference drastically changes the Edmund's place in society as well as his mental health and connection with his father. It is highly unlikely that Gloucester really cared very much for the whore that bore him a son and probably did not spend a lot of time with her during the pregnancy, significantly weakening that hormonal tie. As he says, "I have so often blushed to acknowledge him... and the whoreson must be acknowledged." Due to the expectations of society and his position in it, Gloucester is forced to act as Edmund's father, although I doubt that he was treated with the same love and affection that Edgar was. Edmund's plots against Edgar is less an actual ploy for power as it is a sad, misguided attempt to take Edgar's place and earn his father's love.