The Shakespeare Book

254

W

hile King Lear is often

considered the height

of Shakespeare’s

achievement in tragedy, it

also undermines many of the

assumptions upon which his

other tragedies were built. It lays

waste to our ideals, producing a

vision of nihilistic despair not

unlike the plays of 20th-century

Irish playwright Samuel Beckett.

In this way, King Lear is both

ancient (it is set in 800 BCE) and

remarkably modern.

From the start, Shakespeare

conceived of Lear in a mold that

is significantly different from his

other tragic heroes. Where the

sources give the King’s age as

in his sixties, Shakespeare

emphasizes Lear’s decrepitude,

insisting that he is more than 80

years of age and ready to “crawl

toward death” (1.1.41). Modern

productions often cast a

significantly younger actor

in the role. In 2014, a 53-year-old

Simon Russell Beale played Lear

KING LEAR

as a dangerously volatile figure,

tyrannizing his daughters in the

initial love test, and later stabbing

the Fool to death in a frenzied

attack. But neither in this

production nor in the play as

written is there any sense of

how Lear’s physical strength or

rhetorical power might ever have

served his subjects’ interests, or

indeed how he might once have

inspired admiration and love.

Goneril and Regan suggest that

his lack of judgment in banishing

Cordelia is not a single tragic error,

associated with “the infirmity of

his age,” but a personality trait:

“he hath ever but slenderly known

himself” (1.1.292–293). Without any

sense of Lear’s former greatness,

his descent into madness loses

something of the grandeur and

IN CONTEXT

THEMES

Love, betrayal,

bereavement, and death

SETTING

Ancient Britain,

approximately 800 BCE

SOURCES

12th century Geoffrey

of Monmouth’s Historia

Regum Britanniae (History

of British Kings).

1587 Raphael Holinshed’s

Chronicles of England,

Scotland, and Ireland.

LEGACY

1681 Nahum Tate’s The

History of King Lear ...

Reviv’d with Alterations

adapts the play so that

Cordelia survives and is

betrothed to Edgar.

1851 In his novel Moby Dick,

Herman Melville’s Captain

Ahab rages in the storm, a

scene inspired by King Lear.

1957 The ballet The Prince of

the Pagodas by choreographer

John Cranko, with music by

Benjamin Britten, borrows plot

elements from King Lear.

1985 The film Ran, by director

Akira Kurosawa, turns Lear

into a samurai warlord.

1987 Lear’s Daughters, a

play by Elaine Feinstein, is

a prequel to King Lear.

1991 Jane Smiley’s novel

A Thousand Acres moves the

play’s action to a farm in Iowa.

The story is told from the

perspective of Ginny (Goneril).

Lear divides his kingdom between

his three daughters. In this production

at the Bad Hersfeld Festival, Germany

(2012), Volker Lechtenbrink plays Lear

and Kristin Hoelck is Cordelia.