I am in the midst of writing up a Substack post on Running Grave, Part One, but wanted to note this maybe-landmark moment in Rowling Studies.
It has been known that Rowling went to see King Lear performed in London while she was a Comprehensive student, but, and I welcome correction from those who know her biography much better than I ever will, that this trip was part of her A-Levels study was not. Again, as far as I know, nothing of her A-Levels reading list has ever been revealed and it has not been for lack of digging.
[This is an error; see ‘Shepherd and Biddle: Rowling’s Favorite A-Level Teachers’ for two books Rowling has said were on her English Literature A-Level list: “Tender is the Night [Fitzgerald], Decline and Fall [Waugh].” Whether these were the only books on her A Level list or whether King Lear was also on it — or if she just traveled to see Lear with her A Levels class, as she says — I do not know. Apologies for the unforced error. John ]
I hope very much that the two Rowling Readers and Serious Strikers whom I know have searched in heroic fashion for that list for several years will one day write up their inquiries and its numerous dead-ends. The A-Levels reading course for the young Presence, despite these efforts, has remained something of a Holy Grail for those of who want to know which books were the principal focus of her secondary school capstone exam.
And why would Lear be that important, even among Shakespeare plays?
Because the hot interpretation of King Lear in 1982 was Charles Nicholl’s The Chemical Theatre, published to significant popular and academic review in 1980. No less a figure in hermetic studies than Dame Frances Yates discussed it in The New York Review of Books in 1981. I have speculated in the past (and at some length in my thesis) that, because of Rowling’s London field trip to see the play, her first exposure to literary alchemy was almost certainly via Nicholl and his hermetic interpretation of Lear as an alchemical transformation in stage-story.
Rowling’s revelation today makes that speculation that much more credible. I doubt anything else on her reading list could prove as important with respect to her future story telling tool kit, but I look forward to the day when she will agree to an interview with, say, Oxford’s Beatrice Groves or any other informed reader who will ask her about her A-Levels studies.
Back to Running Grave!
I wrote that Rowling saw the Gambon ‘Lear’ “in London” but that was in 1983 according to this Royal Shakespeare Company report on that production:
Thank you to Nick Jeffery for wordlessly pointing out my error!