Gloss on “Lear”

“Ingrateful Man”

What I feel is so aesthetically awesome (beautiful) about this 2018 version of “Lear” is that it communicates something that is everywhere in Shakespeare, in all of his plays, namely his absolute inability to distinguish between inner phenomena and outer phenomena: outer weather (and tempests) and inner weather (and inner tempests) are One Weather in Shakespeare’s mind, and so too are outer landscapes and inner landscapes One Landscape in the poet’s mind; and so too are outer cosmos and inner cosmos One Cosmos in the poet’s mind.  With this in mind, what becomes so uniquely cool and tough about this 2018 version of “Lear” is its readiness to represent elemental-meteorological storms as mirrors of the storms of human rage– and he represents these parallel storms as something very fruitful, productive, as very necessary, as a form of purging the kingdom and all of its core values — it’s residues of lovelessness, of non-appreciation for beauty, of cut-throat opportunism and avarice, it’s “ingratitude” — of all their obvious destructive death-dealing devolutionary and maladaptive force.  Lear especially wants even his own human condition purged in the interest of coming into a renewed place, into renewed capacity for love and patient attentiveness– which is why he begs that the tempest’s lighting-bolts “singe my white head.”  Key lines from the play that this 2018 version vaguely communicates:

The tempest in my mind

Doth from my senses take all feeling else

Save what beats there. Filial ingratitude [Act 3, Sc. 4]

…. Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!

You cataracts and hurricanes, spout

Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks.

You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head. And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world,

Crack nature’s [now-evil] molds, all germens spill at once,

That makes ingrateful man.

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