Some Lears

Summary

'In Goethe's view, every old man knows what it is to be King Lear. “Ein alter Mann”, he dolefully remarked, “ist stets ein König Lear!”' I quote Peter Conrad's extended and subtle discussion of King Lear offshoots - novels, plays and films - in 'Expatriating Lear', the third chapter of To be Continued. That King Lear may offer a paradigm of old age is a comment congruous with the view of Shakespeare as universal genius, speaking from the height of poetic imagination to the heart of every man (we notice already the absence of women from the formulation).

When we turn to literature the proposition that every old man is a King Lear is both enticing and challenging.

There was an Old Man with a beard,

Who said, ‘It is just as I feared! –

Two Owls and a Hen,

Four Larks and a Wren,

Have all built their nests in my beard!’

The collocation of an old man with a beard and the name of Lear does not, alas, allow me to add Edward Lear's old man to the inexhaustible search for the cultural traces of King Lear in the nineteenth century - though with a little ingenuity and a little straining it would no doubt be possible to relate the bird-loud beard to the trauma of Shakespeare's King Lear in the storm of Act 3 and the madness of Act 4. Certainly searchers for King Lear in nineteenth-century fiction should carry an identikit portrait of an old man in which a beard (white, long and either wind-swept or restored to order by a daughter's loving care) would constitute an important identifying mark.