musings on lear.

My mom has always mentioned to me how much she loves King Lear, so after reading the play, thinking about it, and watching a film adaptation on it, I wanted to get her interpretations of Lear. So here is a brief interview!

King Lear is a pretty heavy text. Do you have any suggestions for first time readers?

Yeah, I think the best suggestion is to have children and enter your senior years. It’s amazing how much more that life experience in those particular areas affects your reading of the play, and you have much greater sympathy with him as a character and with the situations that he’s finding himself in and with this progressive decent into an apparent madness. But you start to wonder if really the world around him is mad.

So when was the first time you read King Lear?

I think the very first time I tried to read it was after I did a production of Macbeth under the direction of my fifth grade teacher and I pulled out a large volume of the complete works of William Shakespeare that we had somewhere in the house and tried to go straight through it and remembered feeling totally lost, that somehow this was like the Bible; it was one of those things that you had to read, so I tried to plow through it but it didn’t mean much. And then I read it as an undergraduate, then as a graduate. I had a class in San Diego and had a teacher who was very big on formalist criticism and we read it very thoroughly, and by that time I had children and life experience, so it was a very different kind of thing that when I had read it as an undergraduate, young student.

So what were the different impressions you had reading it as an undergrad as opposed to when you were a little bit older, reading it as a grad student? What did you take differently from the text?

I think as an undergrad it was rather confusing to me to keep things straight, or to understand this idea of appearances, and the metaphor of the clothing and the nakedness, and it just all seemed like a contrived thing that this man was getting worked up over nothing, I guess there wasn’t the pathos in it that I felt when I read it as an older adult, and when I read it and really went through some of the major themes, I was much more sympathetic to Lear as a character, and that his motivations for doing things, even when they are not completely understood, but at least the outward symptoms of what would seem to be his motivations, started having much more relevance and meaning for me.

What do you think are the basic themes of Lear?

Well, you know it’s easy with Shakespeare to just say the same trite things of parental relationships, or growing old, or loss of control and power, or feeling like your losing those, but those are really so many of the things of our lives. And so they take on layered nuances, you know to see children quarreling about things, which every parent hates to see their children contending for things or resenting each other, that’s just very hurtful as a parent. And then also for someone with that kind of power, it doesn’t matter whatever your little domain is, whether it is around your home, or at work, or relationships with other people, that it’s very threatening to a person’s identity to start sensing power shifts and that somehow you’re being dismissed; that your role, your identity are being challenged. So that was something that really touched me, but also this idea of someone who had been a well-respected, and again a powerful individual, but the appearance or manifesting the appearance of things going out of control, and so manifesting, or exhibiting some of these characteristics are being interpreted by others simply as madness, but to know that there is so much else going on. And the relationship with the fool, that sometimes that inner voice that’s trying to get you to behave, or act, or perceive something a certain way, really is soul-stirring, is troubling, is just so very poignant with Lear that it kind of brings together this idea of family, of growing old, of personal hurt, and not quite knowing how to deal with change.

Do you think that Lear is one of the more relatable plays of Shakespeare? That people can take it into their own lives and relate it to their own experiences?

I think if they choose to. If you have any desire to sympathize with Lear and you don’t just put it off as something too grand, too big, but you find that common element that you might relate to. I think it is difficult because there are so many layers, the metaphors are this range from very complex to kind of simple, overt, but I think that it is definitely one that’s worth exploring, and when people get afraid of taking it on, I think it’s because they’ve had some preconceived notion of it being difficult. I actually loved the fact that I had this teacher who was very much formalist take us through it because seeing those pieces and then stepping back away from that into my own life experience made it one of the most richly rewarding, and if I can say, without being trite, easily understood because it does reflect so many of those things that have become part of my life.

I, like you, was very sympathetic to Lear, although I don’t have children yet, but do you think that there are those who read in to the play being unsympathetic to Lear, and just see him as a mad man? And if so, why would they take that sort of view?

Sure, because he’s not exactly likeable. I mean, you get a sense that his history has been one that has been full of a power struggle, this ascent, that the people around him are responding to. So through their response you kind of get a sense of a man who was probably not easily likeable, and I think that’s entirely believable. That he’s not this person that you want to identify with, because in many ways he doesn’t drive you to be want to be nobler or greater, but I think that’s the very thing that being able to get over that and get some insight. It’s interesting that reading this book, “What the Dog Saw” by Malcom Gladwell, to consider  that things are not just puzzles to be solved; there’s not just one bit of information that you need when you’re studying a Shakespearean play, they are mysteries, there are so many levels and layers, and if you look at them just as puzzles, well, yes, Lear does things that I don’t like, that I really can’t be sympathetic with, but it goes back to those broader, maybe even universal themes, that if you’re willing to take that chance, or give the play a chance, you may not find many things about Lear that you like, but there certainly may be things that you identify with.

Have you read any other version of King Lear?

I have read Faerie Queen, but it’s been a long time. I actually read it the same semester that I was reading Lear, and it’s been long enough that I don’t actually recall anything like that. But the Lear story shows up in all kinds of ways. In fact I do remember reading Death of a Salesman, and talking about the sons and this salesman as being someone that you kind of want to be sympathetic with, but again you see that are you just being sympathetic because you start identifying with him. And yeah, the sons had been done wrong, but I’m trying to think of anything else specifically. The Lear idea does come to mind a lot, when you see how other artists have incorporated that idea of filial contention, or growing old, or even when films show patients, even now Alzheimer’s patients, or those descending into madness, I think they’re all drawing on a Learesque theme or character.

I even thought about Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth.

Yeah, and you know a lot of fairy tales and things, this idea of the child wanting the throne, or the sons being sent out on their own, and how they respond to that. So I think that any time you see that you kind of wonder how much of that is within this collective imagination.

Good. Anything else you would like to add?

Yeah, Lear, the whole play to me, seems very gray. If you were to ask for a metaphor, and I’ve been, in my work, trying to come up with an identifiable metaphor in working with an exhibition on a work of art or something, I’m trying to think if I were to do something with Lear, it’s just everything about it is gray, from the color of the skin, from the interaction, from the gray hair, from the stripping of the clothes,  and a kind of a sallow body, to a gray, lifeless court relationship and family relationship, and it’s interesting to think about that. And yet I have always loved gray, windy days, and so, for me, there’s a bit of romanticism, I guess, in that. But there’s also something that’s very powerful, that’s not just black or white, its somewhere in the middle.