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.
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?
It baffles me that the phrase “In Shakespeare’s defense” is in this otherwise excellent piece.
Many men – and not just madmen – throughout history have thought the way that Lear is thinking in that moment. You can turn on YouTube and see hundreds of videos with hundreds of thousands of views espousing that exact type of stuff. Entire religions have codified it. Women are being surgically altered and confined to huts to this very day because of that mindset.
Are we meant to ignore that, to remain ignorant of the reality that some dudes actually do have those sort of thoughts?
Authors have a responsibility to reveal the darkest recesses of the human mind versus presenting a sanitized-for-your-protection morality play. He’s not advocating a position, but capturing a reality. You may as well take him to task for portraying children killing themselves in Romeo and Juliet.Report
Oh, sorry- I thought it was obvious that my tongue was in my cheek with that line. I’d intended to link in the sentence prior to this article which claimed audiences would have a problem with the passage:
https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/06/the-vagina-shaming-language-in-shakespeare-s-king-lear.html
And then, yeah, what I was getting at was that Shakespeare somehow seems to capture every train of thought human beings have ever been capable of having in his plays, including that of an old man losing his mind who believes he’s been betrayed by all women, instead of just his two daughters who think he’s… well, losing his mind.Report
I’ve seen Lear twice.
The first time was when I was still a teenager and they put a guy in his 40’s in some “old man” makeup. He was pretty good, I guess. I imagine that his tryout was better than everybody else’s, at least. (And, when you’re still a teenager, the difference between “40’s” and “old” is negligible.)
The second time was about a dozen years later, after I had gotten married, and they got a guy in his late 60’s to play Lear.
The first guy read the lines expertly.
The second guy read the lines and you *FELT* it.
“O, that way madness lies; let me shun that; No more of that.”
(Aside to self: “Holy crap. That’s what that means. It’s too late though. But wow.”)
Is there still a debate over what happened to The Fool? When I was a kid, mom told me that the major theories invoked all kinds of psychoanalysis stuff… he represents the king’s lack of wisdom and his disappearance heralds Lear’s gaining it or something about loyalty evaporating or something like that but mom said “He didn’t have an editor. He forgot about the fool and finished the play and then it was too late.”
And I thought that that was silly in my teens but now I am older and see the wisdom in it.Report
Or something dumb like the Fool being played by the same actor as a character who’s more needed in the last couple acts.Report
You mean, Kent and The Fool being the same actor?
Wow, that’s what they did for the production I saw, and it made so much sense I thought it was supposed to be that way.Report
Oh, jeez. That makes sense too.
We went over Faust a couple of times in my college career and one of my professors explained that everybody in the 20th Century reads Faust for Mephistopheles but, at the time, everybody knew that Mephistopheles was evil and they needed to read Faust for *FAUST*.
All that to say: Maybe The Fool is considered the best character ever in the 20th Century but, at the time, he was just a guy and people watched the play for Glouster or something.Report
We had a friend on Twitter talk about playing the Fool and Cordelia n a production and that also makes sense in that they’re never really together.Report
That would be illegal in Tennessee.Report
Some thoughts about Lear:
1) When I went to see it, I knew nothing about it. In the theater gift shop, they were selling note-cards with quotes from Shakespeare’s works, and one of them was “I love thee more than words can wield the matter”. And I thought, “oh, that’s a nice sentiment, maybe I should get that for someone.” And then I went and watched the play, and afterwards I wondered why you’d put that on a note-card, unless it was meant to be sent to someone you disliked..
2) I came to the conclusion that one cannot read Shakespeare. If you’re wondering “why is this guy such a huge deal”, then you have to see it done. Stage direction and performance brings a lot to the understanding of the thing.
3) Also, there’s a lot of stuff you don’t get unless you’ve lived it. I saw Lear right after visiting my grandfather, who’d had several small strokes and was suffering from severe aphasia, as well as the general ailments of the extremely aged. He’d been moving out of his old apartment into a terminal-care facility, and he was very upset that all the things he’d spent so much time and effort carrying from place to place were just going to be thrown away, and he had a lot of trouble expressing that because of his difficulty communicating, and that made him more upset. And, y’know. Here’s King Lear, with everyone telling him “oh, your stuff is such a bother, get rid of all of it, we don’t care about it, we got our own stuff, yours is useless anyway, your whole life is useless garbage and we’re just waiting until we can throw YOU out with the rest of it,” and he’s too old and confused to explain why that upsets him or make a case for it. So, that kind of really hit me harder than it might have done two weeks earlier. (I did take a couple socket sets and a three-foot level, which I didn’t really need but they did fill holes in the inventory.)
4) Another one that prove Shakespeare saved his best stuff for the last scene. “To be tender-minded does not become a sword.” “The laws are mine, not thine. Who can arraign me for it?” “Oh, you are men of stones!”Report
I really, really like your point #3. Such an important part of aging/dying. Thanks.Report
I would say yeah on #2, but it really has to be the right people. I saw a LOT of Shakespeare in Washington D.C. and Stratford, Ontario. And, sometimes, it would be okay. And sometimes it was better than average. And then, once in a while, there would be a production that just blew everything else you’d ever seen on a stage out of the water. But it takes really thoughtful actors.
3. I had a great-grandmother (step-grandmother really) who we visited in the hospital after she’d grown angry and delusional on her deathbed, and the things she said were apocalyptic poetry, Again, I don’t know how Shakespeare intuited all of these states of mind. There’s a Borges story in which God and Shakespeare talk and the former pays tribute to the latter for having such a range of human understanding in his writing.Report
#2 is spot on. The words were meant to be spoken.Report
I saw a college summer stock production of King Lear and it bowled me over. In the sense of getting a bullet between the eyes or getting hit by a freight train. I note that it is much shorter than Hamlet (to be fair, it is frequently said that we don’t have the edited version that Shakespeare’s company played, just the starting text). It is also much more to the point.
I particularly like the business where you are given hope that Cordelia will be saved. A rider is sent. The truth has been unraveled. Something will be set right, at least…but no. Ouch! I don’t think No Country For Old Men which has something similar, did it better.
I think one subtext here is that oppressive, authoritarian regimes are bad for the oppressed, yes. AND, they are also bad for the authorities.Report
Yeah, exactly. I mean, Lear has all the authority in the world he knows at the time, and loses his mind because he can’t compel his daughter to say she loves him more than she should. It’s totally devastating.Report
I’ve been watching Succession (just finished season 3) and in the back of my mind I’ve been thinking, ‘I’ll bet this is a take on King Lear’ but I didn’t know much about King Lear other than ‘it’s about a King and his daughters, and is a tragedy so everyone probably dies from tragic flaws’
And now reading the description above, Succession definitely has King Lear in mind, but does significantly different story beats (so far). (I do basically know the big last season twist as well as who ‘wins’ in the end, but not the journey to that destination)Report