The Three Themes

What is it about Lear that makes it one of the most powerful stories in history? We tend to place it in the hallowed halls of harrowing human drama alongside huge mythic stories like Oedipus, King Arthur, or even the Passion—stories which not only affect us as fiction, but have even played a role in shaping our society.

Some scholars split Lear’s themes up in to three: the familial, the political, and the metaphysical. This is an easy way to break down a play that operates upon the reader or viewer on many different levels at once. I doubt that any production of the play has ever focused exclusively upon a single theme—it’s just not that kind of a play—but productions have certainly emphasized one theme over others.

The familial theme is a good place to start. It does two things at once: it makes the story more accessible (because we all have families), but it also makes it more fantastical, more like a fairy tale (wicked sisters, good sister, etc.). A lot of recent productions have de-emphasized Lear’s function as a king in favour of his role as patriarch. It’s a sensible move; we don’t think of kings or monarchs in the same way as people in Shakespeare’s time would have done. But Dads are Dads, in any century, and Dads can be cruel, and Daughters can retaliate, and so you’ve got a story that anyone can understand (or relate to, if they are unlucky enough to have that kind of dysfunctional family life).

The family aspect links Lear to stories like Oedipus (which is also about a king who discovers that there are more important things than being a king). It makes the cosmic story more intimate. It has a lot going for it. If it has a disadvantage, I’d have to say it can probably be found in the fact that Lear’s harsh words to his daughters sound too harsh when they are put in the context of a modern-day nuclear family. That doesn’t mean they aren’t believable; only that they aren’t forgivable. When we see Lear not as King but as Father, he is no longer “a man more sinned against than sinning.” He’s merely a brute.

The political aspect of the play is trickier, but also rewarding. I think nowadays it’s usually interpreted as a play about class, with Lear as the arrogant nobleman who learns to empathize with the plight of the lower classes. It sounds flippant, and maybe even apocryphal, but it’s right there, in Act 3, Scene 4: Lear sees Edgar the mad beggar and says:

“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this!”

When I read those lines, I feel a strong temptation to do the play as a commentary on 21^st century Albertan politics, with Lear as Ralph Klein. I probably would never go that far; but I do think there is something valuable (and still accessible) in telling the story of a selfish King who discovers that underneath his royal robes, he’s just “a foolish fond old man.”

Then there are the thorny metaphysical questions raised by the play. In particular, there’s the God question. Is there a God in the universe of King Lear? Or more than one god? Are they cruel and sadistic entities, or do they punish for a reason? Do they grant the characters (and the audience) any sort of respite by the end of the play, or do they leave us in a state of distress? Is there light at the end of the tunnel, or just perpetual night? These are the sorts of questions which drive interpreters mad—and just as soon as you think you’ve got them figured out, you have to start working out how to convey your findings to an audience. It’s a Herculean task.

Right now, if I were backed into a corner and forced to defend one interpretation of the play, I would have to say that the gods are neither cruel nor benevolent. Most of the grief and suffering in the play is brought about by human weakness or malevolence; what little is left over seems to be random, coincidental—perhaps a bit capricious but not direct enough to be the vengeance of an angry deity. I’m not sure if that means that the gods don’t exist in Lear’s world, but only that they are silent. But I don’t think they’re silent out of spite. Like the audience in the theatre, they are silent because they are shocked and dismayed. They’re watching a gigantic human car crash and they can’t look away.

Maybe it’s belittling the message of the play, to call the gods a bunch of rubber-neckers. But what else can one say about them? In other Shakespeare plays they intervene, they descend from the heavens and help to sort things out. They would sure be of some use in Lear’s world, but they never show up. Like in the real world, Lear and his fellow human beings are on their own.

I think one of the central issues for resolving these three thematic challenges will be the journey of the title character. If Lear suffers for good reasons, if we see his transition from King to Father to Beggar, if he reaches some sense of personal resolution before his death, then all these themes can be incorporated into that journey at different stages. It’s a bit like the four stages of grief: You’ve got Denial (‘I’m still the King!’), Anger (‘Pelican daughters!’), Bargaining (‘Come on, ye gods, let’s make a deal’), and Acceptance (‘Let’s away to prison’). In the course of that journey, you’ve got the political, the familial, and even the metaphysical.

Gee, when I put it that way, it doesn’t seem so huge. But I know better.