“He is greater on his knees than on his throne.”
— Marjorie Garber (on Lear at the end of the play)
I’m at it again — writing about Shakespeare as a non-Shakespearean scholar but as one who can’t get the Bard out of his mind for long.
For years after college, I claimed King Lear as my favorite Shakespeare play. I think, as a twentysomething, I was mostly attracted to the intensity of it all — the direct punishment of so many characters for their stunning displays of hubris, with the tragedy primarily being the collateral damage to those with purer hearts — especially Cordelia. But over time, I couldn’t really tell you much about the play. It just coalesced into a symbol of literary intensity — and perhaps a cautionary tale about the vicissitudes embedded in power.
So I reread it this ice-stormy winter to see how it all held up in the mind. What it sparked. How I felt about the great multi-generational mangle of the human spirit.
Perhaps the most startling part of rereading Lear is the realization that it speaks so clearly and directly to the times we live in now. I thought this back in college, too. And I now imagine that most readers of Lear have had this thought about the times in which they read the play. A play written in the early 17th century about a 7th-century BCE king speaks of both those times as well as the times in which the play is performed or read. I suppose the startling part is to realize how humanity has failed to advance its collective emotional intelligence over the centuries.
In Lear, there are numerous themes at play — madness, blindness, fools and folly, the existential sense of being and nothingness. But it’s hard to ignore the plays commentary on power, its necessity to the nation, and its human pitfalls. When King Lear tries to divide what probably shouldn’t be divided (the British kingdom) a hell of a storm — real and metaphoric — rises and rages on to the play’s broken denouement.
At the start of play, the aging Lear thinks he’s doing a decent fatherly thing by gifting thick slices of his kingdom to his daughters and their chosen spouses. The arrogance in his thinking, what he is blind to, is that (1) it’s not really what kings do and (2) it’s not wise to base the details of such a sketchy decision on his daughter’s forced proclamations of love for their old man. In this move, Lear seems simply to be seeking flattery, looking for public proclamations of his greatness from his daughters so he can retire from the exhausting business of running this pre-Christian state. One wonders: Does he really expect the truth from all three?
It’s easy to see from a distance (as the audience) how shortsighted and foolish Lear’s plan is. It’s not all that surprising that Regan and Goneril play along expertly, speak profusely of their love for their father, with the sole purpose of securing what they imagine is in their best interest. What’s surprising — and of course, what makes this a play worthy of centuries of readers — is that one daughter, the young Cordelia, refuses to flatter, believing that in a true father-daughter relationship such flattery has no place. In essence, her love for her father is far more real and deep than that of her sisters’. But by not playing along, she ignites Lear’s rather surprising rage and sparks his power to be a punitive jerk.
Given that I’ve also watched the Succession series on TV recently, I can’t help but make a comparison between the show and the play, as others have no doubt done — and to think more on what the two tragedies tell us about human nature. In Succession, the three children of Logan Roy and his second wife are, like Regan and Goneril (with perhaps a smidge of true love in their somewhere), playing along in the Game of Succession (for three painful seasons, to date). The game is about flattery and pretense, with the hope of winning their father’s favor as the chosen beneficiary of his immense media empire. It’s so painful to watch. With each season, the three children, frozen in the worst of the middle-school mindset, seem only to succeed in digging themselves into deeper holes of injury and servitude. As one critic noted, they always lose, even when they think they are winning. So the three children slip into lives of sycophancy as well as a kind of fear and loathing for themselves and everyone around them. They are all broken, debased, morally empty. And, yet, they push on as if there is still something to gain. There isn’t.
By the third season, all I could think was: Why don’t they just walk away?
Though I was also thinking I don’t care anymore what happens to any of them. There’s no Cordelia in this sordid crowd.
Of course, I’m also thinking (though I’m trying to train myself not to) about a current real-life version of this tale — the one in which so many in the political, corporate, and media chambers of America are currently climbing all over themselves like figures in a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape, eagerly selling their humanity and turning nastier by the day in an effort to appear worthy to one former American power figure. To what end? one wants to ask them. What can you possibly expect to gain? And what possible benefit is there for the nation?
In Lear, in Succession, and in American politics today, too many of the players somehow believe that sycophantic behavior will lead to great personal reward. But it can’t. It won’t. The central tragedy in Lear is that the false hope of power blinds us to what matters most. Only when the characters are broken by their own hubris do they begin to see this world more clearly. As critic Marjorie Garber writes about Lear near the end of the play, “He is greater on his knees than on his throne.”
I find myself staring out the window now, wondering why? Why can’t we see where our worst impulses lead? And what is it in human nature that makes such turns toward deception, manipulation, lies, and outright evil so inevitable — generation after generation? Why can’t we get to the late-play wisdom of Lear and Gloucester without repeating all their mistakes first?
Lear — unlike Logan Roy and, to date, the former American power figure in question— eventually sees the folly of his actions. We don’t really know what kind of king he had been. But there are glimpses of his better self that emerge as he slides from king into a powerless everyman. Though the play is set in a pre-Christian era, it carries with it plenty of Christian symbolism about the centrality of love and care and generosity and justice. There’s the obvious allusion to the Psalms — that one should be led by the heart, not bodily desire.
In Lear, three characters — Lear, Gloucester, and (to my surprise, really) Edmund — make the turn in the end toward the Christian spirit — not the kind we see playing out falsely in the American political arena these days, but the blessed-are-the-poor version, the one we’ve been encouraged to see in Christ and seek in ourselves. But, alas, in the play, it all comes too late.
And speaking of too late: I can’t help but connect the storms in Lear to the awful climate-change-driven storms we’re seeing now — tornadoes, fires, hurricanes, blizzards — taking out or burying whole towns and villages, tearing away the shoreline. Three decades ago, we’d have been shocked by such storms. Now we seem to accept them as inevitable, just another ruined Tuesday. We may feel terrible for those who suffer directly, but we’ve yet to take the collective action to reduce global warming.
It’s as if we’ve accepted a future date with destruction.
Lear is here, still — not yet ready to accept the damage done by the cocktail of hubris and power.
What I had forgotten about Lear in the decades between readings is the essential role of the Fool — including Edgar and Kent playing fool-like characters in their efforts to save Gloucester and Lear. As Marjorie Garber points out, these three truth-tellers are essential to Lear and Gloucester’s transformation in the end. Because they are given royal permission to challenge royal power and decrees, they serve as a check on the worst human impulses and aim to instill essential wisdom through a kind of charming Socratic word-play. As I closed my Riverside edition of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets once more, I found myself thinking, we need more such fools now — the ones with truly generous aims and open hearts, the ones who can help us all turn from the path of tragedy.
I’m not sure Lear remains my favorite Shakespeare play. I’ve become quite partial to The Tempest in recent years. But, once again, I impressed with how it speaks to us about civilization and its discontents, about the complexities in the human condition, about family love and drama, about the fragility of politics — and about what awaits each generation that can’t act on its better angels. In the end of Lear, there are bodies scattered all over the place. All we are left with is Edgar and Kent, who survive with their common-good values intact. We can only hope they — and their modern like — can build the world back better.
Side Note
The Art of the Put Down
There are numerous, oft-quoted passages in Lear. But one of my favorite (and less often quoted) is when the Earl of Kent, banished by Lear and returning in the disguise of Caius, verbally takes down Oswald, a steward to Goneril:
“A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mungril bitch; one whom I will beat into [clamorous] whining, if thou deni’st the least syllable of thy addition.”