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Summary
Act 4, Prologue and Scenes 1–6
Prologue
Colborne asks if Oliver blames Shakespeare for what happened. Oliver admits that, yes, in part he does, but he also thinks the group became confused about the distinction between the characters they played and their own lives. The emotional excess of Shakespearean drama was too much for them to bear, especially because they experienced it all twice. They could manage this when they were together, but, over the Christmas holiday, things started to fall apart.
Act 4, Scene 1
Oliver’s Christmas in Ohio is awful, as the family fights over Caroline’s eating disorder. He flees, abandoning a wailing Leah and hopping a bus to New York and Meredith. Meredith is alone in the apartment with her brother Caleb, and they all hang out for several days. For New Year’s Eve, Caleb throws a party. Tired of the crowd, Meredith and Oliver wander toward Times Square, where they kiss at midnight. Back at the apartment, they have sex. For the rest of the break, they wander the city by day and have sex at night. They imagine the year after graduation, how the group will live together in a tiny apartment in Queens. Oliver doesn’t think about James at all during the break but, back at Dellecher, he once again feels jealous.
Act 4, Scene 2
The group anticipates their parts for King Lear, the spring’s play. Filippa expects the assignments to follow the usual pattern, but Oliver says that James’s audition was aggressive and uncharacteristic. When the list is up, they are all surprised. Frederick and Camilo will be in the play as the older characters and, although the female roles follow established patterns, Oliver is assigned Edgar, James is Edmund, and Alexander, the Fool. Oliver is thrilled with his part but only Filippa and Meredith are at the Bore’s Head with him to celebrate.
Act 4, Scene 3
Richard’s absence is increasingly felt as they begin working on the play. While cleaning the Castle, Oliver finds a piece of fabric in the fireplace, bloody and singed. Before he can get rid of it, Colborne enters. They two discuss Shakespeare and acting. Oliver explains that he really only feels alive when he’s on stage, and Colborne notes he’s describing addiction. Colborne turns the conversation to Richard and the differences between the students’ stories, saying that the accounts don’t add up. Colborne admits to liking Oliver and asks him to share any information he finds.
Act 4, Scene 4
Oliver hurries to hide the piece of fabric in the undercroft of Dellecher Theatre. He feels relieved when it is stuffed in a mug and locked away.
Act 4, Scene 5
Oliver is late for his class with Camilo, and James asks where he has been. They are working on a key fight between Edmund and Edgar, trying to master the choreography. But James diverges from the arranged movements, smashing Oliver in the face with pommel of his sword. Camilo yells at James and sends Oliver, blood pouring down his face, to the infirmary.
Act 4, Scene 6
Oliver’s nose is broken. Gwendolyn and Frederick ask him to say it was an accident, even though they all know it wasn’t. When he gets back to the Castle, Oliver goes to Alexander for something to make it stop hurting. They discuss how absent James has been lately and that he seems to be taking on Edmund’s qualities. Oliver takes the joint Alexander has made him outside and, as he starts feeling numb, Meredith joins him. She kisses him and leads him inside.
Analysis
In King Lear, an old man makes an unwise and selfish decision, based on misguided notions of obligation and love, which proves to be his undoing. It is thus an apt play for this group of students to perform in their final semester at Dellecher, as they continue to struggle through the ramifications of their decision, one that is increasingly clear to them was misguided and selfish. As Oliver notes, it has been fifty years since King Lear was selected for Dellecher fourth years because of the casting complications it presents, solved in this instance by assigning roles to the teachers. While the play contains substantial parts for the three female members of the group—and requires no major adjustment to their relationships—the men are surprised by their roles. (Filippa, the group’s most perceptive member, is not.) Although he usually plays a hero, James is given the role of Edmund, a seductive and ruthless character whose impatient ambition leads him to ruin. This role mirrors the important revelations about James that emerge across the later acts of the novel, both that he is the person responsible for Richard’s death and that he yearns to play a wider array of parts.
As Edgar, Edmund’s half-brother, Oliver is affiliated with James, but this role conveys the changing relations between the friends. Where Edmund is scheming and deceitful, Edgar is unfailingly honest and loyal. When he is assigned this role, Oliver doubts himself, but Meredith assures him he has earned it, an echo of her earlier assertion that what she finds attractive about him is that he is fundamentally a good person. There are indications across much of this section of the novel that Edgar’s views resonate with Oliver. As he clears the Castle, he thinks about Edgar’s position from 3.6 of Lear on what it means to suffer alone. Edgar notes that fellowship lightens troubles, making them easier to bear, because solitary people suffer more acutely. With the help of Shakespeare, in other words, Oliver communicates the additional emotional pain they all endure as the group increasingly splinters, tormented by what they have done.
The rift between the friends, as well as the reversal of their relative roles, becomes evident when James deliberately hurts Oliver as they rehearse 5.3. Although it is Edgar who should wound Edmund, James inverts the blocking and smashes Oliver in the face, breaking his nose. This repeats an incident from earlier in the novel, when James hit Oliver on the face as they were learning how to fight. Where the earlier injury had been accidental, caused by Oliver’s failure to move as instructed, there is no accident in this case. As they practice the scene, James increasingly seems to be Edmund, cruel and angry. As Oliver lies bleeding on the ground, James appears as one bewildered or sleepwalking. As with Richard’s overidentification with his roles, James seems to have fused too intensely with the manipulative Edmund. The student have been taught to bring their emotions to the roles they play and this scene exposes a dark side to James’s personality, obscured by his regular casting as the “good” guy. This episode exemplifies what Oliver asserts in the Prologue, namely that they were overwhelmed by the emotional excess of Shakespearean drama, which led them to feel everything at least twice.
As important as Shakespeare is to the novel, it also has features of detective fiction which become increasingly central as the group unravels and the police presence increases. Oliver finds the first clear clue that Richard’s death was not an accident when his custodial duties turn up a bloody cloth. Earlier, in Act 3 Scene 12, Alexander notes that there was blood in the water, but not on the dock, the night Richard died, but this piece of information is quickly overshadowed by a discussion of Hamlet and their dead friend’s character. Oliver’s discovery of physical evidence of a crime is coupled with the arrival of Colborne, who engages him in conversation and asks directly for him to share any information he might uncover. Although Colborne first explains his sense that the facts don’t make sense with reference to mathematics, he shifts to an idiom he knows that Oliver will understand, citing Hamlet instead.
