Recording of performance by Rupert Smith and plenary reflections from the What Happens Next radical creative writing symposium, 21 June 2023 University of Salford, UK and online.

Title: “‘Infinite Textualities always on the move’ (Derrida): Trapdoors into Everywhere in Shakespeare’s King Lear.”

Abstract: The location scouts are racing back from a storm-wreaked Dover coastline to storyboard a fresh re-mythologising of an ancient state-of-the-nation tragedy. Are they perhaps disquieted by the darker purpose of Lear’s map (1.1.35) with its division subject to merit, and wanton tearing up? Or are they more perplexed by the possibilities of vastness? There is, after all, the vanishing into a void of the gadfly Fool with neither explanation nor backward glance following an unfathomably prophetic speech. Gwilym Jones proposes that it is precisely the lack of location in King Lear that contributes to its disorientating ethic (Shakespeare’s Storms, 2015), the ‘logic’ of suffering and redemption finding its ideal counterpoint in an extensive wasteland.

This creative-critical paper is a performed reading of the play’s stories of radical decentering, of exile and disintegration; it forms part of an experimental fiction project that thinks about lacunae: a pining lover flailing in a sea of ‘Nothings’, a hapless forager where there’s ‘scarce a bush’, an acrobat suspended between the root of Cordelia’s tongue and her heart, the chasm out of which any glib and oily art might dare to crescendo.

Bio: Rupert Smith is an AHRC funded Creative Writing PhD student at Lancaster University. His research project is Tract: an experimental hybrid novel written within the cracks of Shakespeare’s King Lear, and an investigation into the complexities of genre-fluid fiction as a container for poetics. An actor and poet, his remit extends to orality and performance. Tract will be staged as a work-in-progress solo spoken word show at The Storey, Lancaster in October 2023.