I wanna talk King Lear. Few writers have had the effect Shakespeare has had on me. Not anything new there. But ever since I started reading him on my own, without the pressure of recognizing every example of allusion spun by ultra-fans with far too much time on their hands, I finally get why he's timeless. Teachers have been telling me as much for years, but it wasn't until I focused on what Shakespeare put on the page, nothing else, and ditching this notion that you have to have some sort of higher learning to understand complicated stories, I see the beauty in it. I've since begun to read everything in a different way.

Good stories don't need context. The only thing that matters is what's written on the page. I think understanding the historical context is valuable in that it can nurture your reading experience, but the good writers haven't forgotten to put exactly what they mean to say on the page. All there is to know about Lear and his daughters are right there on the page. You don't need someone else's interpretation, criticisms, or textual notes to understand Shakespeare's narrative tricks and mastery of metaphor and parallelism (particularly in the case of the dual storylines of Lear and Gloucester).

Gonna be spoiling King Lear for the rest of the article. Please go read it, it's a haunting reflection.

All good? Good.

The end is where Shakespeare tells you what King Lear is about. Which is fitting, because it's about the end. The End Times, that is. N. B of Inquires Journal says "the just and loving God is not present and in its place is the cruel nature." The title of the article even quotes one of Kent's most harrowing lines that gives away what Shakespeare was getting at with all this pointless tragedy:

Kent: Is this the promised End?

Edgar: Or an image of that horror?

I don't need some ten-gallon head write up on King Lear to understand that things have gone horribly wrong. To the point of where it seems to have skewed the leveled frame of Earth. Seriously, the endings for each character come in rapid fire in the final scene, like the storm Lear howls at wearing a green-crossed crown of thorns and debating with his Fool, the only character in the play who seems to have any idea of what's coming.

Shakespeare caked this play in nihilism and the glutton of mortality. You could read it as Shakespeare vilifying nature, as it's personified throughout the story:

Kent: Things that love night / Love not nights as these. The wrathful skies / Gallow the very wanderers of the dark.

Or:

Lear: Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, / strike flat the thick rotundity o' th' world! / Crack nature's moulds, all germains spill at once / That makes ingrateful man!

You could read that as good Christian Shakespeare attacking the infidel Pagans. Or you could take this line:

Lear: I know when one is dead, and when one lives;/ She's dead as earth.

And you could see it from a whole different perspective. The ravings of a man who just lost the only daughter who loved him, or maybe this is how the dialogue between Lear and Nature ended. I think it's inducing to read a lot of Shakespeare this way, that there is some meta-story happening under the surface. Similarly, I think it's fun to read Hamlet from the perspective that Hamlet is the only sane person in the story posited by Peter O'Toole. The point is, these conclusions are just drawn from reading the story and thinking about it. There isn't anything about it that's advanced, it just requires patience. To that point, this must have been what those interpreters of Shakespeare were doing when they novelized their interpretation of Lear and Hamlet.

The problem is, stories like these are either dismissed or hidden from because of how we've pontificated them, as these incomprehensible tales. Really, Shakespeare is pretty clear about who his characters are and what they do. It's the why and the price paid on either side, before or after, of what the characters do and say that make them so rich. It's less about understanding what it means and more about questioning what it means. The questions you have are much more important then any answer you could find in college.

But when is it "right there on the page?" What's an example of Shakespeare finally ditching all pretense and defiantly explaining what his stories, in this case, King Lear, is about? Well, I think it comes to people at different points throughout his work, because every line matters. When an author has survived four hundred plus years, you have to assume he knew what he was doing. I think we owe it to ourselves as people to be nosy with our stories, without the leer of Dr. I'm-so-sick-of-teaching-Shakespeare's cloudy and warped glasses looking over us pretentiously. Take a chance. Try something that's exhausting. For me, the moment Lear clicked with me and changed the entire atmosphere of the story, which I discovered late one night sitting in my chair, by myself, was the final line by Edgar, raw with Hell:

Edgar: The weight of this sad time we must obey, / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say: / The oldest hath borne most; we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Exeunt with a dead march.