King Lear

I watched the 2008 filmed stage production featuring Ian McKellen as King Lear, and oh my goodness, I hated it so much. Sorry, Shakespeare. I hope your reputation survives.

What a preposterous, convoluted story. Shakespeare is pretty melodramatic in general, but this was a whole new level. It’s a complete soap opera where everyone is betraying everyone, going insane, plotting against each other, disguising themselves, and getting tangled up in love triangles. All while the body count steadily rises.

And it’s just so relentlessly depressing. The eye-gouging scene in particular was brutal, and then we have to spend what feels like the entire last third of the play watching poor Gloucester stumble around in agony. King Lear’s fool tries his darndest to add some comic relief, but eventually even he disappears.

Unlike the other Shakespeare tragedies I’ve seen or read so far, I also wasn’t particularly interested in the psychology of any of the characters. Lear is already so irrational from the opening scene that his downfall didn’t mean a lot to me, and I didn’t get enough background on his daughters or their family dynamic to feel like I really understood how they got to this point.

I did try to read more afterward about why the play is significant, and I picked up on some stuff about competing views of nature, reason, and social order at the time. Maybe if I spent more time digging into that side of it, I’d find more to appreciate. But on a purely reading/watching-this-as-a-play level, I don’t know. It was just not an enjoyable experience.

Book author: William Shakespeare