I am a fan of Shakespeare's tragedies, though so far I have only read a handful. King Lear, which The Queens of Innis Lear is an adaption/reimagining of, I had not read nor known basically anything about prior to the few days before I read Innis Lear, but I am glad that I took the time to do so.
Considering that I read King Lear on my own, in just a few days, with only a single YouTube video (Shakespeare Summarized: King Lear by Overly Sarcastic Productions) to guide my reading, I am sure that much of it went over my head, but I did get the general gist: children betraying their fathers causing the downfall of them and their line, and the nihilistic nature of the world being the two that stand out the most.
The thing I found most interesting about Innis Lear was how it reimagined this story while turning those two major parts of the original story on it's head. Where the original play is predominantly about Lear himself, as well as Gloucester, the two fathers betrayed by their children, Gratton instead chooses to focus on their children, and how their fathers' perceived betrayals and treatment lead them to preform the actions they do in the play. This in turn takes away much of the randomness of the original, where bad things happen just because the world is cruel and unfeeling, allowing for the reader to get an understanding for why Lear's two eldest daughters so vehemently turn against him, rather than it just being that powerful women are evil, which is how the characters in the original play read to me.
Honestly, I found it really impressive how much the themes of the story were changed while also predominantly sticking so close to the original play for the majority of the story. There are scenes, such as when King Lear divides up his land by having his daughters say how much they love him, where the dialogue is almost line for line from the original play, with some minor edits in places to make it more easily understandable for contemporary readers. As the story goes on, larger differences to the events become clear, such as Kent (here Kayo) being blinded rather than Gloucester (here Errigal), who instead dies in a duel with Cornwall (here Connely), who dies as well. Additionally, King Lear himself dies near the end of Part 4, meaning both of the fathers who were the epicenter of the original text do not get the reconciliation with their 'good' children that was present in the original, and reinforces that this reimagining is about the children themselves rather than their fathers.
This new focus of the story on the children is clear from the beginning, as the majority of chapters are told from four points of views: King Lear's daughters Gaela (Goneril in the play), Regan (one of few characters who keep their original name), Elia (Cordelia in the play); and Ban the bastard (Edmund in the play). There are the occasional chapters from the POV of various side characters, such as Morimaros (who takes the role the King of France serves in the play) and Aefa, a new character who is Elia's companion and daughter of King Lear's Fool; there are also flashback chapters, and some of the most important chapters are told from no character's POV at all, such as Lear dividing his kingdom. But overall, it's mostly those four children. Notably, not a single chapter is told from King Lear's point of view, or the point of view of Errigal, again taking the focus away from the fathers.
Unlike in the play, where honestly the two eldest daughters feel evil just because, Gratton allows the reader to understand their motivations and what lead them to this point, as well as empathize with them even as they commit heinous acts. Personally, I found myself relating to and understanding the plight of Gaela, even though she still remains one of the most cruel characters in the book. Though never directly stated, Gaela is asexual, which is an identity still rarely represented in media, and as an asexual myself, I found many of my own feelings and experiences reflected in hers. She is also very gender non-conforming, as a warrior queen (or king, as she prefers), and her going to the woods witch Brona to get her uterus removed is honestly something I wish I could do myself. Her background and the source of her hatred for her father are also incredibly sympathetic, rather than just being power hungry (though, she still is most certainly that). To believe that your father killed your mother in part because of you, because some star prophecy places her death in relation to your birth, to believe your father cares more about what distant, unfeeling stars say should happen rather than your own wife, rather than how it would impact his own children... regardless of the fact that Gaela's belief is later revealed to be false, her hatred towards her father because of this is incredibly understandable. Not to mention her using it to take away what blame there may be on her for her mother's death. This isn't to say that she is a good person; she most certainly isn't, and the fact that she would blind her uncle and murder her own husband (vile as he was) is proof of that, but she is much more three dimensional than her counterpart in the play.
Regan likewise gets fleshing out that allows her to be more than just an evil, sexual daughter (though she is still these things). Her desire for a child from her own body, and her clear inability, is heartbreaking, something that is immediately clear from her miscarriage in her first chapter, the most recent of many similar failures. Personally, I'm more like Gaela and would never like to give birth, but Regan's desire and pain are still clear and powerful, and I could still sympathize with her. Her hatred for King Lear is just as understandable as Gaela's. She too believes Lear murdered their mother, and the three things she loved were dismissed by him: Gaela he cares not for, due to her being tied to the prophecy of his wife's death; her husband, who she passionately loves, is despised by Lear for his family's history of desiring the crown; and wormwork, the magic of the land which Regan practices, was forbidden by Lear after his wife's death. Not to mention that he dismisses her out of hand for the fact that no star hung over her at her birth. With all of that, if I was in Regan's position, I would hate Lear with a passion as well. And unlike Gaela, Regan is willing to listen to Elia when she reveals the truth of their mother's death, but she's been through so much loss that her grief is just too much. Even with all of the vile scheming she does with her husband and Ban, for as evil as she is, Gratton has still managed to make her into a tragic figure undone by grief.
One of the two additions Gratton made in reimaging King Lear, outside of adding depth to characterization, that I liked the most was King Lear's wife. To my recollection, Lear's wife is never mentioned in the original play, by him or his daughters, which just leaves the presumption that she is dead. How she died, when she died, how Lear or his daughters felt about her, are not present, which seems odd for a story about parent vs child in hindsight. Comparatively, The Queens of Innis Lear makes Dalat a central figure to the shaping of Lear and his daughters' characters. That she came from a distant kingdom means that when Lear sent away her companions after her death, her daughters were left with only Kayo, their uncle, as connection to her. Her death distinctly shaped all four members of her family, with Lear's grief giving way to fanaticism and his madness, Gaela and Regan being impacted as discussed above, and Elia burying her grief and stifling her emotions, following her father's love for star prophecies and turning away from the magic of the earth. Although only rarely present even in flashback chapters, Dalat's death looms over much of the book. Along with the addition of Brona, wood witch and mother to the bastard Ban, she is one of the many changes that takes the story of Lear away from the men, the fathers, and gives it to the children, the daughters, and in part to the mothers absent in the original.
The other addition that Gratton made to the original story that I really liked was magic. Unlike some of Shakespeare's other tragedies, like Hamlet and the Scottish Play, King Lear has no elements of magic. The closest it gets is when characters evoke the names of pagan gods and demons, but there are no ghosts, no witches, no unnatural forces present in King Lear, just the uncaring world. Gratton adds two kinds of magic in her story, which are made integral to the story in this version. The stars, distant and unfeeling, give prophecies to those who know how to read them, but like the world in the play ultimately care not how they impact the lives of the people. Lear's fanaticism for the stars leads to motivations for many characters who seemingly had little in the original, as discussed above, and pave the way to Lear's madness. The other magic is the worm work, the magic of the earth, which is practices by Regan, Elia, and Ban. It makes the land of Innis Lear itself into a character, who speaks and feels, who has been thrown into chaos by Lear's grief and madness and the turning of family against family. It makes the discord of the characters manifest in the environment, reinforcing the unnatural state present in both versions of family turned against family, as well as the imbalance that is created by placing one thing above all.
Which is perhaps one of the strongest themes of Gratton's reimagining. The initial discord in the Lear family is created by King Lear placing the stars above all, even his wife and children. Lear himself wants his daughter to put him before anything else in his game of being told how much they love him. Gaela places her desire for power above everything, even the one sister she loves, while Regan places her husband and her love of worm work above everything else, which leads to both their destruction. Ban's desire for someone to put him before all else, and the lack of it, leads to him creating his own path of destruction. Only Elia understands the need for balance, how you can love more than just one thing deeply, how love isn't a limited well but grows to encompass all those loved. And this allows Elia to survive, unlike in the original story, where the others cannot. "I love you more than all the stars in the sky" is seen as romantic, but why can't you love someone and the stars? Why does love have to be a competition? I personally do not experience romantic or sexual love, but I do feel other types of love, especially platonic love, very deeply. And like Elia, I don't treat it as a competition. I may love different friends in different ways, but I love them just the same. And the expanding nature of love is something that is often forgotten, especially with people my age, who may make their significant other the most important thing in their life, in a way which, like the characters in Innis Lear, frequently grows toxic and destructive.
Despite the fact that Innis Lear ostensibly has a more hopeful ending than King Lear, considering that the Lear line is actually continued by Elia surviving and becoming queen, it left me with a much deeper feeling of melancholy than the original did. King Lear is nihilistic and tragic almost to the point of farce, almost comedic in the bleakness of the world and the cruelty of its characters. No one is very sympathetic, so it's hard to care when they suffer. Comparatively, Innis Lear makes you care for and understand those who suffer the most deeply, so it's actually impactful when they do suffer or die. I felt basically nothing for the characters while reading King Lear, and when I finished I was able to process my thoughts and feeling fairly easily, with no sense of grief or pensiveness, able to move on pretty quickly. Comparatively, when I finished Innis Lear, I sat on my back patio for over a half hour while it stormed, watching the rain almost sightlessly as I struggled to process the overwhelming sense of gloom and pensiveness that permeated me, and my feelings about the book and characters. Perhaps that is why this reflection ended up being so long. Even writing this a day later, I'm still working to process, figure out, and understand my own thoughts and feelings about this novel. Which, honestly, is what a good story should do.
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