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Act 4, Scene 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in If We Were Villains, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fate vs. Free Will
Identity and Disguise
Love and Sexuality
Theatre and Corruption
Summary
Analysis
The spring show is announced: it’s King Lear. The fourth-years frantically prep for their auditions, surprised that Gwendolyn and Frederick have chosen a play that generally requires an older actor for the lead role. On the evening of the auditions, Oliver waits for his friends at the Bore’s Head. Filippa joins him after a few minutes and asks Oliver what he thinks the casting will be. He predicts that Wren will be Cordelia, Filippa and Meredith will be Regan and Goneril, Oliver himself will be Albany, James will be Edgar, and Alexander will be Edmund. Filippa tells him that he saw James audition with a Richard Plantagenet monologue from Henry VI Part 2, which begins “And force perforce I’ll make him yield the crown […]” She thinks that James will be Edmund, not Edgar.
This scene recalls Act 1, Scene 1: the students are predicting their roles according to their typecasts again. In King Lear, Edgar is the virtuous male “hero,” while Edmund is his brooding, villainous counterpart. The two characters are half-brothers. Albany, Goneril’s husband, is a smaller and less significant part than that of Edgar or Edmund. Thus, Oliver’s prediction follows old patterns: James will be the hero, Alexander the villain, and Oliver will play a bit part. It looks like James might have other plans, though, since his monologue suggests that he’s seeking to seize the part of the villain for himself.
Themes
Oliver says that it’s good for James to get the opportunity to try something different, but he doesn’t really believe Filippa. Two hours later, however, Meredith arrives with the cast list. Frederick is King Lear, Camilo is Albany, Wren is Cordelia, Filippa is Regan, Meredith is Goneril, James is Edmund, Oliver is Edgar, Alexander is the Fool, and Colin is Cornwall. Oliver, Filippa, and Meredith are baffled, but Oliver is also excited at the prospect of playing Edgar. Meredith tells him that he deserves it. They stay at the Bore’s Head a while longer, but Wren, James and Alexander never appear because Wren went to bed right away, James seems to have been in a mood, and Alexander is suspected of being with Colin. Oliver worries that Frederick and Gwendolyn cast faculty in the play to keep an eye on the students.
Oliver has a fixed vision of charismatic, do-gooder James in his mind, which prevents him from seeing James’s full capabilities for darker behavior. But Filippa turns out to be right, which means that Oliver and James’s places in the cast have both shifted: now Oliver is playing the hero and James is playing the villain. This is what James and Oliver said they wanted back on the night before Julius Caesar auditions—so why does James seem unhappy about it now? For someone who tends to get absorbed in his parts, it seems like the role of the villain could be dangerous—and maybe he’s feeling the effects already.
Themes
