To make up for the fact that I didn’t have a Shakespeare post last week, you get two this week — one tragedy (from last week) and one comedy (this week’s play).
King Lear is my father’s favorite Shakespeare play, which was enough to give me pause before even starting it, as my father and I tend to get along like oil and water on a good day. But I pushed on with an open mind, thinking that there are a few different books my father and I agree on (generally anything by David McCullough), so this might be one of them.
I, just like Lear in the play, should have gone with my first thought when dividing the kingdom of my time. It would have saved a lot of problems.
My main issue with King Lear is that, in the end, there is no one for me to root for. I may feel bad for Lear, but I also feel bad for Edmund — who, after all, couldn’t help the circumstances of his birth. Cordelia is too passive (and then too stupid) for me to get behind, and her sisters are even worse. The final scene where Lear carries in the corpse of the only daughter who actually gave two figs about him was supposed to be heart wrenching in the senselessness of her death, but instead led me to banging my head on the wall at the senselessness of the tale.
Everyone who could have learned is dead, and everyone alive did not need the lesson in the first place. And to top it all off, there’s no hero for me to root for.
In every type of media, we need a hero — Lord Byron documented this at the beginning of his epic Don Juan (though he called it an “uncommon want”). The hero doesn’t have to be moral (Walter White isn’t), or sensible (Ted Mosby isn’t) — they don’t even have to be nice (Gregory House certainly isn’t). But we need someone who has enough humanity for us to root for them.
And that’s where King Lear as a story falls down.
There are no moments where we see Lear’s eldest daughters or Edmund as even close to human. And yet, at least they are not disgustingly passive in the way that the rest of the characters are. Even Edgar, possibly the only character I wouldn’t smack soundly, doesn’t make me want to root for him.
I don’t know these characters. I don’t have any frame of reference for these characters, even at the most basic level — that they are recognizable as human. And thus I cannot love these characters — I cannot root for them.
They’re not kind nor competent. Nothing that would lead me to cock my head to the side and muse “Yes, I have met someone like this character. They could be real”.
The heroes that we root for are people that we know. They’re not paragons — because people aren’t perfect. As amazing as Shawn Spencer’s detective abilities are, he would not be half as likable if we all hadn’t met the slightly spastic kid who was far smarter than they let on. More than that, we’ve all had moments where we didn’t let on exactly how much we knew, or how much we saw.
We’ve known Shawns. We, at certain points, have been Shawn. But none of us know a Lear, and none of us have been Lear. Heck, I have a very senile grandpa and I still don’t associate Lear with him. Because my grandfather is a real person, and Lear (and the rest of his court) isn’t.
I’ll be honest, it kind of kills me that this play was such a let down, that it relies on a thin thread of plot where it could have featured great and nuanced characters.
And that’s something to scream about.
Something to Scream About 