It’s one of the most gut-piercing scenes ever to be enacted on the theatrical stage. An old man, bleary-eyed and half-naked in …
It’s one of the most gut-piercing scenes ever to be enacted on the theatrical stage. An old man, bleary-eyed and half-naked in an ancient English heath, rages against a pitiless storm: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!” His shrieking at the cutting rain is unworthy of his royal pedigree, for he is a king: King Lear. And if we could match every year to a Shakespeare play,2020 would undoubtedly be a “King Lear” type of year. “Lear” is the greatest tragedy ever written, because it’s so damned tragic. Schoolchildren are taught “Romeo and Juliet” and even “Hamlet,” but fewer teachers dare go near “Lear.” From its hopeful opening, which finds a royal father planning to magnanimously bestow his kingdom upon his three daughters, to its bloody end, where nearly every meaningful character lies dead, the Bard is unsparing. The play was so dark that for more than 150 years, eminent critics like Samuel Johnson approved Nahum Tate’s rewritten happy ending. Johnson admitted he couldn’t re-read the last crushing scenes until the work of editing Shakespeare’s collected works forced him to do it. And America’s 2020, as I say, was a “Lear” type of year. No, it didn’t feature a revolutionary or civil war. There were bread lines, but not as bad as the Great Depression’s.
