It took me quite a while to ‘get’ King Lear. Whilst familiar with Macbeth from high school English class, Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest from having read them independently in my teenage years [my initial copy of the Complete Works – I now own four (all unsurprisingly gifted to me) plus separate paperbacks of each play – starts with The Tempest], Henry V from seeing the Branagh production at age 20, and The Taming of the Shrew from going with some friends some time in the late 1990s at the Botanic Gardens for an evening performance, I did not really get into Shakespeare til age 28.
At that time, working for a few months in Box Hill, I had abundant extra time on the train to do some reading. So I packed a paperback of one of the plays each morning as my commute reading. I must say that I found most of them quite enjoyable, and particularly enjoyed the metaphysical nature of Hamlet [a play which is better to read than to see performed in my humble opinion].
But I did not at that time really get why critics generally rate King Lear as one of the four great tragedies. Back then, I saw the great tragedies as having some sort of dualistic moral dilemma: Hamlet has knowledge and innocence, as in the Fall from Grace; Macbeth has guilt and innocence; and Othello has love and jealousy. In my mind, Lear lacked such a dualism. Julius Caesar, with the dilemma of love and duty, more deserved to be considered one of the great plays than Lear.
As you might guess, I had not read any Greek tragedies at that stage, even though quite a few of them were sitting unread in my bookcases. The Clouds, one of the more irreverent comedies by Aristophanes, was the only Greek play with which I had any familiarity.
My opinion of King Lear changed when I first saw it performed live in 2005, which left me quite impressed. A good production of Lear, ending with him grieving Cordelia, can project quite a lot of tragic pathos. This did set me off on a binge of watching live productions of the plays whenever I could, and by now I have seen about two thirds of them performed.
I did get around to reading the Greek tragedies in my late 30s or early 40s, and that did cause me to finally ‘get’ how great King Lear really is.
Lear is the closest that Shakespeare has come to a Greek tragedy in all his works. The themes of vicious betrayal of and by your closest blood relatives is what we most commonly see in the Ancient Greek plays. The most vicious of those are the ones which follow the generations deep curse of the Atreides, seeing this royal lineage constantly caught in a god-ordered cycle of murder, sacrifice, vengeance and exile.
Medea, one of the plays written by Euripides, perhaps is even harsher. Spurned by her lover Jason, the embittered Medea murders their children in a fit of vengeance, then to be born off by the gods in a chariot pulled by dragons.
It perhaps is an understatement when, in the introductory voiceover at the start of each episode of Xena Warrior Princess, we are reminded that the ancient gods were petty and cruel, and plagued mankind with suffering. (Not that Xena, even with the Greek myths and histories to guide the script writers, ever bothered with verisimilitude.)
In recent months, I have become fascinated, like a kangaroo in the spotlight, with the sorts of stories republished in Facebook, and which originate in another social media platform, Reddit. These stories are, to put it nicely, quite horrible, and the most popular ones which my algorithm feeds me are about parents abandoning their children, siblings stealing each other’s spouses or significant others, and dysfunctional step families.
Many of the most popular ones are where, like King Lear (or Agamemnon, if you want to look back at the cursed Atreides of ancient Athens) a parent singles out one of their children for inexplicably vicious treatment whilst the others are given preference. Such mistreatment rarely goes further than neglect or abuse, unlike the actual infanticides (and parricides and matricides) of the Ancient Greek writers, but the general gist of the behaviour is similar: those who are closest to us, who we should most love and trust, are the ones who can hurt us the most.
Twenty years ago, we would have gone to Judge Judy to view the ersatz modern equivalents of Greek tragedy, but now we do not need to reach so far. Social media, in the form of Reddit (and its allies Youtube, TikTok, and Facebook), makes it possible for people to post their stories to a widespread audience in the hope that ‘random internet strangers’ will give their unbiased advice and wisdom.
Perhaps, we, just like the audiences in 5th Century BC Athens, have a similar need to watch these stories, and to be horrified and gratified at the same time by these narrators of these domestic tragedies.
But I do wish that perhaps, we would have greater opportunity to actually see some of those original great Greek tragedies performed live than we currently do.
Lost For Words! 