There is only one thing better than watching the glory of Ian McKellen’s Lear

And that’s watching Ian McKellen’s Lear whilst eating a Popsicle.

Machiavellian conspiracy theory Lear is always the best Lear.

Check it.

Senility is for the weak.

Oh, Richard.  It’s villains like you that make my career in academia possible.  Despicably, magnetically, seductively evil villains like you.

(Richard III I.i.117-120, I.ii.114, 117-26, 138-41, 144-9, 153-55, 159-205, 222, 227-8, 251-259, 262-3)

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Why Lear is not to be Pitied

A partially substantiated hypothesis.

Most readers and playgoers of Shakespeare interpret Lear as an image of a man suffering the ravages of old age and familial revolt.  What seems overlooked, however, is the end result of the events instigated by each of Lear’s actions within the play.  Throughout the drama, between raging at the storms upon the heath and the faces of sorrow, a far more sinister and manipulative motive emerges, but his deceptions appear to have been so well-crafted that even the modern audience accepts the face he presents.

To start, Lear has a problem at the beginning of the play—not that his daughters don’t really love him, but that he has only daughters to love him.  Lear has no male issue.  Two of his daughters are already married at the beginning of the play, and while he may have preferred one, Albany, over the other, something has changed, and he lavishes his attentions on him no longer.

Kent: I thought the king had more affected the duke of Albany than Cornwall.

Gloucester: It did always seem so to us; but now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most, for equalities are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety.

I.i.1-6

This  point is emphasized at the beginning by the display of Gloucester’s dilemma, namely possessing too many potential heirs.  Edmund’s favorable position with Gloucester makes him direct competition for Edgar at the get-go.  While Lear’s disadvantageous position was sprung upon him by fate, for he had no choice in the gender of his issue, Gloucester’s comes from his seeking to share his acknowledgement and affections.

Gloucester: but I have a son, sir, by order of law, some year elder than this who yet is no dearer in my account: though this knave came something saucily to the world before he was sent for, yet was his mother fair, there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged.

I.i.18-23

When Lear enters, he begins with his “darker purpose,” but he is in fact not expressing his secrets, but his ruse.  He states that he has divided the kingdom into three in order to take care of business before he dies.  This, however, is the swiftest way to plunge any kingdom into civil war.  A divided kingdom is a dead one, to which any empire or kingdom in history can attest: when the lands of a kingdom are split between heirs, there is inevitably a power struggle.  With the Wars of the Roses not so distant in the mindset of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, not to mention being revitalized in his histories, the “darker purpose” Lear addresses in his first scene would most likely have set off alarms in those who heard it.

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