Lear rears his old white head

I gave one of my Shakespeare talks last night, part of which deals with King Lear.  The old boy still festers in my mind despite the disappointment of not being able to direct the play last year.  I think, perhaps, you have to be either old or to have suffered grievously to really understand Lear.  I qualify on the former count but happily I have had the luckiest of lucky lives and I need all of my imagination to conceive of true suffering. 

Obviously part of my talk concerns the famous scene in which the old man is thrust out of doors by his family onto the heath in the middle of the night in a howling gale, thunder, lightning and torrential rain.  I reminded my audience that in a theatrical performance where special effects are limited they really did need to use their imagination for that scene.  I asked them, and most of them were exceedingly elderly, to imagine how they would cope were their families to eject them from their comfortable h0mes and out onto the middle of Dartmoor in a storm.  I was about to go on to describe Lear's re-action, a final outburst of absolute fury of the sort which was, at least partially, part of his downfall, when suddenly a rare shaft of light entered the denseness of my mind.  Anger is one of the deadly sins which Shakespeare frequently uses as a fault line in the character of his tragic heroes - see Coriolanus - and Lear's anger on the heath is epic.  However, what had never occurred to me before was that it was also - heroic.  Seen from his point of view, the fates? - the gods? - the cosmos? - had reduced him from kingship to nothing - and the word 'nothing' and its variations crops up over and over again in the text giving us a clue as to Shakespeare's philosophical pre-occupations.  But does this angry old man give in?  Not a bit of it.  He hurls back his defiance.  He shakes his puny fist at the universe and dares it to do more.  It is magnificent!  Of course, it comes under the heading of futile last gestures but in a way that makes it all the more admirable.  Shortly there-after he loses his mind and now he truly is - nothing.

Later, he recovers his sanity and at last his anger and pride have been dissipated, his eyes have been opened to the truth and he is reconciled with his young daughter, Cordelia.  At that point, Shakespeare changes the traditional ending of the 'Lear story' which in every other version ends happily and instead Cordelia is hanged and Lear, on discovering her body and lacking now the strength of his former anger and pride, he subsides "gently into that still night".

There is no doubt in my mind that King Lear is the very greatest of all Shakespeare's plays.