Sunday Morning! King Lear by William Shakespeare

A mythic king is reaching the end of his reign in a pre-Christian world and has to decide succession. He chooses to divide his realm between his three daughters (or their husbands rather). But, first, he will have them each tell him why they believe they love him the most. The first two daughters fall all over themselves to flatter their father. The third daughter, the King’s favorite, refuses to play the game, telling him instead that she loves him only as much as duty requires. Enraged and hurt, the King banishes her from the kingdom. He then banishes his most loyal aide for calling out his mistake, thus compounding that mistake.

Subsequently, almost everything he does after those first key mistakes, will be another mistake as he quickly goes mad.

Overcome by the painful realization that his two daughters, Goneril and Regan, actually despise him and question his elderly decision-making abilities, while he’s spurned the one loyal child, Lear is himself pushed out into the wilderness, in a storm, to lose his mind, along with his Fool. Meanwhile, the Earl of Gloucester, who tried to help Lear, has been accused of treason and had his eyes plucked out, and been left to wander the earth blind, while his bastard son Edmund (who he also stupidly sided with against his good son) is trying to gain power by seducing the two wretched daughters.

It all ends badly: nearly everyone dies tragically and, in the end, there is very little justice.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.

Returning to the play decades later, I realize I had little idea how nightmarish it is when I was a child- a vision of a world where God has not yet been invented, and the most basic bonds between children and their parents are perverted to catastrophic ends. Lacking even that basic family connection, the elder characters are left maimed, maddened, lost, and helpless, where once they were all-powerful. The world is done with them.

Humanity must perforce prey on itself, like monsters of the deep.

1700s illustration of David Garrick as King Lear

Like most American children, I first read Shakespeare in middle school, which means I was initially exposed to this preternaturally powerful language by listening to classmates’ squeaky voices trying to sound out many of the words for the first time!

Eventually, if you make it through that, the teachers will take you to see some local production, wherein a neighborhood hardware store employee declaims the words sounding as much like a low-rent Laurence Olivier as they can, and it begins to make a bit more sense. At this point, if you reread the play, its power will finally begin to seep through, in spite of all the barriers that have been laid down by your education.

And then, when it was newly published, I read Jane Smiley’s novel, A Thousand Acres, which updates Lear to an American farm and flips the roles, so that the father has been sexually abusing his daughters, whose anger is now much more sympathetic. I still found the novel to be about as subtle as a sledgehammer; but I will say I was 18 at the time and not sure I realized how frightening Shakespeare’s Lear is already, how much a nightmare of patriarchal power is in the very wrong hands.

What’s really most interesting to me is that, when I was a teenager and had to read the play in high school, I simply assumed the nature of this tragedy is the collapse of respect for Lear and Gloucester and the waning generation; the young betraying the old. The failing of which I was most likely to be guilty of at that point in my life, in other words.

Now in my 40s, I see the play as being much more clearly about the failing of power hierarchies in which so much strength can be invested in one man. Lear is brittle, emotionally-fragile, declining mentally, and no longer in charge of his faculties. But, because of how power is concentrated, he remains King, for the time being. It’s no wonder his daughters want him out of the way. But, of course, the ones he chose have ice water in their veins. So, the realm has no good options, short of being conquered. And, Shakespeare seemingly sees this as the failing of all concentrated hierarchies of power: they’re always vulnerable to human weakness and wretchedness and stupidity.

And the creature run from the cur? There thou
might’st behold the great image of authority: a
dog’s obeyed in office.

It’s a bleak vision and the language is some of the strongest in Shakespeare. In fact, the language is almost too strong. It seems to break apart the play. The mad rantings of the king seem about ready to drive us mad in the audience. (Trying to write about the play in my weaker English feels like shooting peas at King Kong.) Banished to the wilderness, Lear meets the storm with a typhoon of words. His rage is directed against his daughters, yes, but also all women; something modern readers find hard to stomach, as in this unsavory description of the female nether regions.

But to the girdle do the gods inherit.
Beneath is all the fiends’; there’s hell, there’s darkness,
There’s the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding,
Stench, consumption! Fie, fie, fie! Pah! pah!

In Shakespeare’s defense, Lear is a lunatic monster by this point. And, more importantly, his rage against women is just one small sliver of his rage against all the things he cannot control in this mortal world. He is, after all, just a man, an old man, and his life is as frail and fleeting as all things on this earth. Lear tries to meet the storm of the world with the storm inside him, but he’s no match for any of it. None of us are, Shakespeare seems to say. And so, our familial and political structures are also the flimsy constructions of madmen. Like I said, it’s a bit of a nightmare.

And so, what are YOU reading, writing, watching, playing, pondering, or raging against this weekend?