He who would be king

Asked who was the greatest French poet AndrZ Gide famously replied, ‘Victor Hugo, hZlas!’

I confess to having had similar feelings about King Lear. Of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies I find it the bleakest and least sympathetic, with the most exasperating protagonist and the most preposterous sub-plot. The naivety and perverse behaviour of young Edgar are hard to credit. Wrongfully estranged from his father Gloucester through a blatant trick played by his bastard brother – something a moment’s explanation could have put right – he hastily flees and takes on the disguise of a garrulous, mud-caked lunatic. Gloucester’s later on-stage blinding often cited by defenders of video nasties – ‘Shakespeare got there first, you know!’ – is for me artistically ill-judged. If too realistically performed it dwarfs Lear’s own agony; if too feebly carried out it comes near to absurdity – like clumsy minor eye surgery.

And yet, all frivolity laid aside, the play’s emotional depth, its language, either staggeringly rich in imagery or heart-rendingly simple, the subjects treated – old age, insanity, family feuds, the gradual acquiring of wisdom through suffering – these amount to a tragedy more profound than any other that Shakespeare wrote.