King Lear

When a piece of work carries tags such as “the greatest piece of literature ever written by a single person,” expectations are bound to be sky-high. However, King Lear failed to move me. While I could identify certain moments that justify its cult status, the overall experience left me underwhelmed.

And one reason for this is probably my exposure to the Mahabharata. There is little in King Lear that hasn’t already been explored—often more expansively—in Vyasa’s epic. Paternal love gone awry, exile and banishment, nature’s fury unleashed, the descent into madness, guilt, remorse, reconciliation, mutilation, lust, illegitimate heirs jockeying for power, and of course, war—all these themes are integral to the Mahabharata and handled with unmatched psychological and moral complexity.

I watched two adaptations of King Lear. One was the 2018 Antony Hopkins version and the second was Kurosawa’s 1985 adaptation – Ran – set in feudal Japan. Hopkins delivering these lines to Cordelia before being imprisoned together,  carried some punch:

No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out—
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.

Prof Paul Cantor in his lectures on Shakespeare and Politics, devotes four hours to King Lear. In it, he argues how Shakespeare discussed a lot of Hobbe’s political philosophy half a century before his Leviathan came out. The bard, through the play, showed how chaos can ensure when the sovereign dilutes his hold over power. In the state of nature, Lear’s life becomes just as Hobbes wrote: ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.

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The Shakespeare Project so far: Macbeth | The Tempest | The Merchant of Venice | Twelfth Night | As You Like It | Much Ado About Nothing