March 17, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:27:14
3621 Shakespeare's King Lear Revealed | Duke Pesta and Stefan Molyneux
One of the most powerful stories in the world, King Lear magnificently describes the destruction of a kingdom through greed, vanity, manipulation - and a bottomless thirst for political power. William Shakespeare is the undisputed master of describing intergenerational conflicts, but many other themes run through this magnificent story. Join Stefan Molyneux - a former Shakespearean actor - and Dr. Duke Pesta, a tenured professor of literature, as they discuss the deep meaning and existential themes buried in one of the greatest tragedies ever penned.Dr. Duke Pesta is a tenured university professor, author and the Academic Director of FreedomProject Academy, a Live Online School offering individual classes and complete curricula for students in Kindergarten through High School. For more from Dr. Duke and the FreedomProject Academy, please go to: https://www.fpeusa.orgFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyne from Freedom, Maine Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Here with a good friend, Dr.
Duke Pester, a tenured university professor, which is the only reason he can appear on this show, author and the academic director of Freedom Project Academy, a live online school offering individual classes and complete curricula for students in kindergarten through high school.
And you can find out more about Dr.
Duke and the Freedom Project Academy at fpeusa.org.
Dr.
Pester, how are you doing?
Great.
I gotta say at the outset, I'm glad to be with you.
I spend my whole day as a professor talking to pot-addled 20-somethings about this very topic, and they reek of Fritos and stale tuna.
So this is a huge step up.
Well, I hope you don't have too many early morning classes, because there's only so much that students can learn about iambic pentameter through one blood-stained eyeball.
One bloodshot eyeball.
So, yeah, no, we're talking about King Lear, and...
To me, Shakespeare is the master of intergenerational conflict, and this resonates to me as powerfully now as I'm sure it did when it first was written and produced.
And I myself played in a version of King Lear when I was at the National Theatre School.
I played the only evil character I've ever played, the guy who gouges out someone's eyeballs.
Yes, that's right.
And violence in the media is not a new phenomenon.
And I had a very, very powerful experience.
I dreamt about the play.
It really gets deep into your skin.
So I wonder if you could, I mean, you've obviously read and studied it for many, many years.
What are your thoughts?
What are the first thoughts that come to mind when you think about Lear?
Well, you know, as a professor of English, a Shakespeare professor primarily, I always find it difficult to teach this play to undergraduates because they haven't lived enough.
You know, they can identify with Hamlet's swashbuckling.
They could identify with the witches in Macbeth.
They could, with Othello and all the racial dynamics, they're ready to go for that.
But this play is, in some respects, it's the kind of play that you have to have lived a life and you have to have suffered to get.
And that, I think, is for me, it's a theodicy, this play.
A theodicy as a literary term.
A theodicy is any work of art that seeks to explain the role of suffering in human affairs.
And in that regard, I find that my 20-something undergraduates, even my graduate students, they haven't lived enough.
They haven't cried enough.
They haven't suffered enough to really be able to connect with Lear.
It's in many ways above their heads.
So I think I mentioned last time when you and I talked about Hamlet, I think the older I get, maybe it's an age thing, the older I get, the more I think that The more I can relate to Lear and the more I think this is in some ways a better play in terms of the pathos that it evokes and the philosophy behind the characters.
We get a lot of Hamlet in Hamlet, but the other characters are less fleshed out.
In this play, you really do get a good look into the mind of Edgar, of Edmund, of Cordelia.
It seems like there's a lot more going on in this play on a number of different levels than even a play like Hamlet.
I think for younger people as well, like, I mean, if you're 20, 25 or whatever, your parents are still in their prime.
You know, your parents may be 50 or, you know, 55 or whatever.
But, and we don't, I don't think we ever find out exactly how old King Lear is, but he's damn old.
I mean, that's sort of the key.
And it doesn't really matter his physical age.
He is in the early stages of dementia.
He is a character whose life has been corrupted by power.
And control.
And his fluency in verbal abuse is truly staggering, which I sort of wanted to get to a little bit later.
But if you're young and you haven't witnessed the degeneration of your elders, which you generally don't, I mean, unless you're very unlucky, you don't really meet in your early 20s, when you get into your...
I remember a business partner I had many years ago.
He said, and this is when I was younger and this stuff was all just hazy down the road and I'd never really imagined that I'd reach it or if I would, I'd be completely flawless physically.
But I remember he saying, oh yeah, you're mid to late 40s.
Yeah, your problems with your teeth and your parents get old.
And I just remember him saying that and I'm like, well, that can't be the case.
And it's like, well, I actually know that there's quite a bit of So I think until or unless you have to deal with parental infirmities, it is tough to understand what the daughters in particular are going through.
Well, I think it's really remarkable, too.
One of the big cruxes of the play for your listeners out there who may not have read it recently or at all, King Lear is winding down.
He argues that at the beginning of the play, he is now so old that he wants to avoid civil strife.
He's the king.
He's got three daughters and no sons.
So in the world in which he lives, he decides that rather than give the kingdom to his oldest daughter and her husband, he is going to break the kingdom in three.
And give it to each of his three daughters in equal parts.
He thinks, in a very misguided way, that this is going to prevent, in his words, civil strife.
We know it won't.
You can't take a big kingdom and make it three little kingdoms and not expect the infighting to breed.
But what I love about it is that Lear keeps arguing in the play that he's old, he needs to retire.
But he has the energy of a 40-year-old.
He has the verbal capacity of a brilliant 25-year-old.
He is robust.
He is in every way, shape, or form one of the most active and physical characters in the whole play.
So I'm always fascinated by the disconnect in Lear's own mind because he wants to break up the kingdom, but he doesn't want to let it go.
He wants to have all the title of king.
He wants to reserve his army.
He wants to reserve 100 knights to follow him.
In other words, he wants to govern without being the governor.
And that to me is a disconnect.
It's not even necessarily—he thinks he's more intellectually broken down than he is.
His powers are at their height.
It's not until he divides the kingdom in ultimately two parts after Cordelia's banished.
He divides the kingdom in two parts instead of three, and then his daughters turn on him.
It's then that his mind starts to go.
It seems to be the worse he's treated by his flesh and blood, the more you see that mental degeneration.
But at the beginning of the play, he seems to me sharp as a tack.
Well, this is the great question.
And madness, of course, runs all the way through a significant number of Shakespearean tragedies in particular.
But this is the big question.
And it's the same question with Hamlet.
Is he mad?
And I would argue that no.
I think King Lear is going through a nervous breakdown, which is a cheesy way of saying an existential identity crisis.
When I was in theater school, I remember that one of the great statements that I remember was, if you play a king, it's not up to you to play the king.
It's up to everyone else to play that you're the king.
So you don't walk in the room and then command everyone.
You walk in the room and everyone obeys you.
And that...
Social support for a false self, for a socially derived personality structure.
When everyone agrees that you're the greatest, you develop...
It's not really a personality, it's like scar tissue.
There's a wound of vanity, there's a wound of flattery, and this false self is the scar tissue that grows over that wound.
And then when the flattery Is withdrawn.
And to me, it's ironic that the kingdom falls into chaos, partly because he decides to divide it into three, but I think even more so because he has this ridiculous test of vanity and flattery regarding how the kingdom is to be divided.
So, for those who don't know, he says to his daughters, okay, I'm going to divide the kingdom up into three.
And, you know, there's better parts and there's worse parts, and I'm going to give the best parts to whoever tells me they love me the most.
I mean, okay, I understand it's democracy and, you know, flattering the masses, and that's how political power is derived.
It's not really supposed to how it's worked in a monarchy.
So his vanity, his need to be praised, his need to be...
To have his vanity assuaged, to be flattered, to me is the foundational problem.
And then what happens is, because of his addiction to being flattered, his addiction to vanity, he makes terrible decisions geopolitically, which then result in the undoing of all the flattery.
And who is he left with?
What aspects of his personality survive the withdrawal of flattery that comes with his power?
You know, in defense of him a little bit, because that seems to be the standard reading of this in many respects.
And there's no doubt that the flattery is key.
But I try to put myself in Lear's position.
If you are the king, the only way you have to test the loyalty of the people is their willingness to flatter you, right?
You can't read their minds.
Remember what Othello says, or what Macbeth says.
There is no art in the mind to, you know, determine what's in the visage.
There's no way you can look at a character, King Duncan says in Macbeth, And tell what he's thinking.
So if you're the king, flattery is the coin of the realm.
If a subject is not willing to flatter you, then you know right there that you've got a problem, right?
At least the way the game is played.
So what Lear does is, this is the dichotomy for me that gets me.
He is both king and father to these girls.
And the balancing act between the two of those things, from a purely political standpoint, when you've got the whole kingdom assembled, right?
Lear's been king for about 60 years.
We know he's been on the throne for about 60 years.
He's probably pushing 80, which was ancient in the 16th century.
So he's pushing about 80.
And the whole kingdom is only known—he became a king when he was about 12 years old.
So he became king as a little boy.
So for almost 60-plus years, he's been the only king England has known.
So here he is divesting.
He has no male heirs.
So you can imagine the nervousness of the polity.
He gets the whole kingdom together, more or less, to tell them what his intent is.
It makes sense to me that he would demand from them a public assertion Of their fidelity, their loyalty.
He's got to convince the kingdom, right?
That these daughters to whom I'm breaking up the kingdom, I'm going to give it to them, they have to profess that they love me, right?
There's a certain political comedy there that makes sense.
C-O-M-I-T-Y. There's a certain political comedy that makes sense for a king to me.
That I want you to trust me, the king says, that I'm turning the kingdom over to capable hands, my daughters.
And so to do that, I need each of you, my girls, to make a public testament to your fidelity, your love for me.
As a king, that makes sense to me.
As a father, it's the end of the world, right?
It's just disgusting.
But if you're the king, how would you know anybody loves you unless they tell you?
you.
And if you're a smart subject of the king, by the way, you're going to tell him you love him, even if you don't.
And that's what's so stunning when some of his advisors like Kent actually tell him the truth.
He's immediately banished for doing so.
Cordelia, when she tells him the truth, I love you as much as a daughter should, dad.
And if that's not enough, too bad.
Well, it's not enough.
And she's immediately banished.
Politically, I can understand where you're coming from, but he's a father.
He's known these daughters for, you know, it's hard to know what age they are, let's say 40.
I mean, they're always played by sort of the middle-aged battle-axe-faced women, but whose gaze could turn a penis into a piece of rock.
But as a father, he should know.
As a father, he should know his daughters very well.
Not only did he raise them to some degree, but they've kind of lived close by.
You know, they've been in and out of his life.
They didn't go to Australia or something like that.
So he should know.
This sort of public demand for the display of affection can't be driven by a need to figure out who his daughters are.
Because if he doesn't know by the time he's pushing 80...
A public speech of flattery isn't going to give him any new information.
And so that to me is the challenge.
And if they were men from another country, or sorry, if they were men within England that he was considering dividing up his kingdom to, I could understand, you know, I want to see verbal fluency.
I want to see thinking on your feet.
I want to see negotiation skills.
I want to see diplomatic skills.
So maybe that would make sense.
I'd actually...
Rather, he would say something like, tell me how much you love England, rather than how much you love me.
But to me, combining the political with the personal and demanding a vanity-soaked praise poem from his daughters on the spot, I think is, you know, the fatal flaw, the fatal weakness that these characters always seem to have.
And with him, it's the corruption of power and vanity, because he should know which of his daughters is best by the time he's 80.
I think that's a great point.
I don't think it necessarily goes against what I'm trying to say, is that I agree with you.
It's that dichotomy, right?
That the fact that he demands As the king, at one and the same time, a sort of political loyalty and an emotional one.
They all get mixed up in his head.
But it is absolutely clear to me, too, that when you say, I would rather hear loyalty to England, he clearly is England, right?
I mean, in his mind, he has become the state.
Ever since he was a little boy, he's been the king of England.
And we must give him his due.
He's obviously been a remarkable king, right?
Because everybody loves him.
There seems to be no distrust, no conspiracy in his kingdom.
But it comes down to that.
Does he know his daughters?
And for me, in the tragedies, whether it's Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Lear, any of them, one of the things that is most compelling is how the character's tragedy is spurred by the fact that they do not know themselves.
That there is a corresponding—all the tragedy is pushed over the hill.
The snowball starts rolling down the hill because of the lack of self-awareness.
Lear, who's been king for 60 years, He has gotten comfortable relating to people through flattery, right?
He's gotten comfortable with these visible signs of loyalty.
Again, you can't command a subject's heart necessarily.
Kent even says it.
A subject's heart is his own, right?
But you can command their loyalty, you can command their behavior, you can certainly command their verbal fealty.
And so with his daughters now, I just don't think he knows how to be king versus father, father versus king.
And so he does, though, to make your point, he does seem to know those girls.
Because he comes in, there's a big map behind him, right?
And on that map, he's already divided the kingdom of Albion, England, into three separate parts.
And they are three similar parts.
So it's already been done on the board, right?
It's already been done on the map.
After that, he asks the girls, Whoever loves me the most, whoever can vocally express their love for me the most, they will get the biggest part of the kingdom, right?
And yet he's already broken it up, so this is clearly an exercise on some level.
And when he gets to Cordelia, the youngest daughter who speaks last, he finally says to her, "And now Cordelia, our youngest but not our least, right?
To whom the love of Burgundy and France, the two great potentates, the king of France and the king of Burgundy, they want to marry Cordelia, right?" And so he says, "What can you say to earn a third more opulent than your sisters?" And he loves her, right?
That's the first two girls, Goneril and Regan.
He asks them what they think.
They spew the flattery out, and he goes on to the next one, right?
Okay, you get this and you get this.
As a matter of fact, by the time he gets to Cordelia, Goneril and Regan have already gotten their parts.
It's not like he can take it away from them.
What gets me about the play, what tugs at my heart right away, is the one daughter he loves and trusts.
The one daughter who, in his own words, he hoped to set his nursery on.
As an old man, the one daughter he trusted to look after him is the youngest.
And when he asks her to tell me something more than the other two daughters, she says, I cannot heave my heart into my tongue, right?
I love you the way a daughter's supposed to.
And for you and me, that sounds right.
I would want to be loved by my daughters the right way, but for Lear, it's not nearly enough.
Well, okay, I mean, I've heard, I've had a bunch of different interpretations of Cordelia, because she is a little bit like the fool without the wit, right?
The fool, which we want to get to shortly, is the one who can keep thrusting his rapier of comedy through the armor of Lear's vanity.
But Cordelia, it's like, come on, lady, you know how the game is played.
You're not new to this.
This is not that, you know, so come up with a couple of nice things to say about Dad, right?
You know what I mean?
It's like if your father's 80 and he's having some party and all your friends and your family is over and, you know, you got a toast and you say a couple of...
It shouldn't be that hard to say a couple of nice things about dear old dad, especially because there does seem to be this bond and so on.
So part of this is, you know, this...
Well, Dad, you know, I love you as a daughter loves his daddy.
You know, I mean, why would you need any more?
She knows her father.
Like, this resistance to, you could say, flattery, but she says that she loves him, so why not make it, you know, put a little bit of sugar in the medicine?
And this sort of thing where she's, well, you know, I'm not going to say it.
I'm not going to say it.
I mean, it's like, that's kind of annoying, you know, because if you look at the events set in motion by the fact that she can't cough up a few iambic pieces of flowery and flattery to throw at her dad's feet...
It's kind of douchey in a way.
It is, but in her defense, you know, play the other side of the coin...
The two girls that went before, Goneril and Regan, she knows they don't love her father.
She knows that they just want power.
It's even better than that.
Goneril says, I love you as much as possible.
I love you more than space, eyesight, liberty.
More than all that, I love you.
Then Regan comes along, the second daughter, and she says, I love you as much as my sister, but infinity, plus one.
At that point, Cordelia, in a couple of asides, she says, Then what is my love?
I mean, these girls have used the most possible superlatives falsely.
And her argument is to play that game is not only to cheapen love, it is to concede the value of their fake love.
So I get your point, and I think you're absolutely right.
This whole play could be averted.
If Lear had separated, pulled the girls into a private room for this part of it and just doled out the kingdom publicly, or if Cordelia had played the game.
But she makes it clear that it's playing the game she doesn't like.
And I want to throw this out at you.
You think about the name Cordelia and the way it's spelled.
None of the sources for Shakespeare's play spell it the way Shakespeare does.
Cordelia, C-O-R-D-E-L-I-A. If you think of the word Cordus, the first part of that, it's the Latin word for heart.
Cordus is heart.
Delia is, of course, the famous Renaissance anagram for ideal.
Renaissance fathers would name their daughters Delia as a play on the word ideal.
In a sense, Shakespeare has uniquely spelled Cordelia's name to mean the ideal heart.
And so as the ideal heart – in fact, if you look at her speeches in the play, Cordelia mentions the word heart in her speeches dozens of times.
She says at this point in the play, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth, right?
I can't express these emotions because my two sisters have already corrupted those words with their false tongues.
And back and forth you go across the play.
And it is Cordelia who, when Lear does go into his episode, we call it his identity crisis.
I don't think it is madness.
I think you're right.
It's identity crisis in Act 4 when he seems to lose his mind a bit.
It is Cordelia who patiently Kisses it back into him, his sense of who he is.
But again, my last comment about the intro here is that without these kind of seemingly hyper-dramatic moments at the beginning of plays, you wouldn't have a play at all.
Hamlet, all that had to happen is Gertrude didn't have to hop into bed with his uncle, and you wouldn't have had a play.
So we have a little suspension of disbelief, I suppose, at the opening of a play to get the tragedy rolling.
No, and of course, I mean, you have to have the instigating moment.
But, you know, trying to figure out why it's happening is, to me, also important.
And the one thing that I see happening throughout the play, and to me, this is where the emotional power of the play is.
Like, I've never read or watched it or anything like that without, like, running out of salt in my body, just weeping copiously.
And to me, it's a very powerful thing to see...
The trappings of vanity, the trappings of power, the trappings of flattery, the trappings like you're trapped, fall away from a person.
And to me, one of the most powerful lines, unaccommodated man is no more than this, a bare forked animal.
And I remember my English teacher from college, the professor, he was talking about this play and he drew a little lollipop.
Like, you know, the circle, a bare forked animal.
That's it.
You're just a body.
Just a body.
No crown, no robes, no flattery, no bowing people.
You are just a man in a storm.
And the stripping away of other people's view of you and the stripping away of other people's manipulation of you through flattery to the point where you are atoms and flesh facing the elements, to me, If you've known vain, empty, manipulative people in your life, I think that there is a kind of desperation in a lot of us for those in power to be stripped of the delusions of power and to recognize their common humanity as Leo does.
My favorite parts in the whole play, I mean, yeah, the fights, the politics, the sword fights, it's...
It's when Lear describes the world as it is, rather than as it was when he was still ensconced, like a fly in amber in this trappings of power.
He describes the world as a bare thing, as it is.
And that, to me, strips right down to metaphysics, right down to us being meat and mind and matter, rather than delusion and social status.
Yeah, I think you make a brilliant point.
Think about Hollywood right now.
Hollywood is collectively King Lear, right?
Incredible power, incredible privilege, incredible platforms, all the superficial pieties, all the superficial outside appearances.
And we see how vacuous we are.
The same comeuppance that Lear gets is what we'd love to see happy, the bubble of these pompous stars to be popped.
But you brought up that, to me, I'm with you.
The whole play turns on that storm scene.
And that speech you just referenced, the one where Lear seems to finally get it, he's not alone, remember.
There's Lear.
He's lost his crown.
He's lost his knights, his retainers.
His daughters have locked him out of doors, the two remaining daughters.
Cordelia is banished, and she ends up marrying the King of France, and she moves to France, right?
So Goneril and Regan are the two daughters, and they immediately start pulling him to pieces.
They take away his retainers.
They take away his power.
They take away his source of revenue.
And eventually they lock him out into a driving, driving thunderstorm.
And the moment you mentioned is when he comes across a little shed, a hovel.
And lying there in the straw is another character, poor Tom, right?
This is Edgar, right, in the subplot of the play, the son of the Duke of Gloucester, who has been betrayed by his half-brother, and he too has been reduced to nothing.
This kid was going to be the next Duke of Gloucester, one of the reigning families of England, but because his bastard half-brother planted false evidence against him, he now too has been driven out into the storm.
And so when Lear is out there pondering, feeling sorry for himself, right, he happens to see this Broken down hovel, an old shed.
And he fixes to go into it, and he looks down, and he sees poor Tom, Edgar in disguise, groveling there in the straw, wearing nothing but a loincloth.
And when Lear has that moment of recognition, that epiphany, he's still feeling sorry for himself as having lost his power.
When he sees one suffering more than him...
That triggers the speech, and here it is real quick.
I mean, it's worth thinking about this speech.
He looks at the body of poor Tom, and as a king for 60 years, he's always been warm first.
He's always been fed first.
He's always had the best clothing and housing.
Now, he turns his attention away from him to somebody else for the first time, and he says, why?
Thou wert better in thy grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies.
Is man no more than this?
Consider him well.
You owe the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume.
Ha!
Here's three on us that are sophisticated.
You are the thing itself.
Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.
And he immediately starts taking off his own clothes to be more like the thing he finds there groveling in the straw.
Very humane moment, right?
Where all the pretense of coming first, being king, royal prerogative, he wants to be now in his brokenness.
He wants to be even worse off than the poor suffering man groveling there in the dirt.
And that's where he becomes Lear again.
That line he says a little bit later, who is it that can tell me who I am?
And in this play, it's suffering.
It is suffering that acquaints him with the harsh realities of what he and what we all are.
And when the man he banishes comes back in disguise and says, I will follow you.
You have an aspect of you that I would like to follow.
And Lear is like, well, what is that?
And he says, authority.
And a question of authority to me comes back again and again and again in the play.
And when Lear is reduced to his essence by the storm and by the consequences of his own parenting, I want to sort of circle back to the sisters who are always portrayed as, you know, malevolent and evil.
And I I get where they're coming from.
We'll get back to that in a sec.
But he says, and I'm paraphrasing, but he says, a beggar runs from a dog.
That is the great image of authority.
Dogs obeyed in office.
And he says, they flattered me like a dog.
And the idea that a king is a kind of pet of power.
That there's a public face to political power.
And, you know, we see this going on in the American post-Donald Trump election, that there's what's called the deep state, which has been written about since the 1940s.
It's sort of the permanent part of power that uses the public face of politicians in order to hide itself.
You change the hood ornament on a car, it's still the same car.
And this idea that he was a pet of those who used him to advance their own political interests, that he was domesticated, that he was not in charge, that he was a slave to the system, a slave to flattery.
To me is very powerful.
And the flattery that goes on, like I was thinking about this with regards to Hillary Clinton, right?
So the media would flatter her all the time.
You know, a great statesman, public servant, blah, blah, blah.
They would flatter her all the time.
Why?
Because if she gets in power, she serves their interests.
So their flattery makes the political leaders into a kind of pet of a more permanent set of power.
And I think that he recognizes to some degree that he did not have that authority innate to himself.
He had that authority innate.
By the grace of those who chose to obey him.
In other words, he was a slave to their obedience.
And this idea that authority is a dog or a kind of pet that's used for the purposes of others to me is very powerful.
And it was a great warning against the temptations to power when I was younger.
Yeah, and you know, dogs are all throughout that play as a source of this.
The quote you just made was beautiful, right?
That they flattered me like a dog, right?
It wasn't just that a dog's obeyed in power, right?
He said, that's right.
You want to see the image of authority?
Even a dog, if it has sharp enough teeth, will be obeyed like a king, right?
If you're a beggar with nothing, that dog has the power to have authority over you because of its teeth.
He starts with that, right?
Even the dogs obeyed an office.
But then he turns around and he says, they flattered me like a dog, right?
Now we see the opposite side of dogs.
Dogs as fawning, lickspittle creatures, right?
They flattered me like a dog.
They told me I was everything.
They were wrong.
I am not egg-proof, right?
And out in the storm, he just caught a cold, right?
And he tells that horrifying story in that very same passage about when he was a little boy, when he was the prince regent and did something wrong, they couldn't spank him.
As the prince regent, even as a little boy, they couldn't lay hands on him, the servants who raised him.
So what they would do is they'd find some poor kid off the street, drag him into the prince regent's bedroom, and spank him in front of young Lear as a way to try to get the message through to Lear, right?
They flattered me like a dog.
They wouldn't even spank me when I was bad, right?
They flattered me like a dog.
They told me I had, I love it, they told me I had gray hairs in my beard.
Before the black ones were even on my chin, right?
They called me wise when I was a teenager, right?
And so now, this is where I think we feel sorry for Lear.
The commodity, right, the currency for kings and their suitors is flattery.
It's unfortunate, but like you said with the media and Hillary Clinton, this is still the truth today, right?
That people in power, the currency between them and those they rule is what, for lack of a better word, we call flattery.
And how does Lear think outside that box?
It's not like he came to the throne when he was in his 40s, right?
Where he'd seen the world and figured out how people were.
He's a little boy when he came to the throne.
What I think is so redeemingly tragic about Lear is it's the only thing he's ever known is flattery.
And that, to me, takes some of the responsibility away from what he demands from his daughters.
Even when he was a little boy, this is how it worked.
And it's all he knows.
What's so sad about the play, and why I like you, I mean, it makes me cry every time.
What's so sad about the play is he doesn't know another way until he loses all his power.
It's not like he cynically kissed butt himself to rise through the ranks.
He started on top.
And now he's not on top.
And now he sees how false that flattery is and how it was all tied to his authority, not his person, not his accomplishments, not his justice or the mercy he exhibited as king, but simply because of that crown, which he no longer possesses.
And so that's a heartbreaking, epiphanic moment, right?
When, oh, you mean they weren't telling me the truth.
They told me I was everything.
But look at me.
I'm just an old man with a cold now.
They lied to me.
Nature doesn't flatter.
Nature just is.
And when I was, this is sort of in my 20s when The whole Bill Clinton scandal broke with Monica Lewinsky and the way in which he had just horribly mistreated his intern and just done, to me, fairly unholy things to her youth and innocence and trust and dependence and so on.
And I remember I was in a car.
I was in the States.
It was back when I was an entrepreneur.
I was on a sales trip with a salesman.
And I remember listening to this on the radio and I remember thinking, oh, man.
This is going to be like, wow, what a crisis moment in America.
The feminists are going to go insane.
And then he just kind of skated through it, in a way.
He just kind of got away with it.
And to me, everyone has this fear, I think, deep down in their heart, that when you're a kid and society says, do this because it's good, there are principles, there are morals, there are ethics, and if...
You don't obey them, you're a bad person, and you will be punished.
And we're punishing you for the sake of virtue, we're punishing you for the sake of goodness.
It's not just a mere exercise in power.
It is not because we're bigger and stronger, and it's not because we want you to conform to the good, not to us.
And this shows up in Crime and Punishment as well, but one of the most amazing things Pieces of eloquence in the text.
And this is an amazing thing to write in a monarchy.
Remember this, right?
Shakespeare was writing—he was not free to write everything he wanted.
It's one thing to remember.
He was somewhat a vassal to the powers that be.
But he says, and there's this old saying about, the law is a curious net.
It catches tiny fish and all the big fish swim free.
And he says, when he talks about power, his power to, and he keeps talking about justice and he has pretend courts in the play.
And he says, through tattered clothes, small vices do appear.
Like if you're poor, people are going to pick on your tiny vices.
Through tattered clothes small vices do appear.
Robes and furred gowns hide all.
Plates in with gold and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks.
Arm it in rags.
A pygmy's straw does pierce it.
Amazing when he says, I thought I was an agent of justice.
I may have just been an abusive agent of power.
No, I think that's absolutely beautifully articulated.
And again and again, it comes back to justice and mercy.
You know, one of my favorite moments where we talked about the fool as truth-teller.
It is one of the most magnificent characters in all of literature is the fool.
He's this boy.
Apparently he's just a boy.
I mean, I've seen him cast anywhere from 40 to years, Lear's 80, but Lear talks to him like a boy, right?
There seems to be a father-child relationship there.
And this fool is a truth-teller.
All great fools to kings were.
To play a fool, to be a king's jester, was to find ways to tell the king the truth that nobody else would tell him.
But you had to do it in such a way that made him laugh.
And we talk about a perilous existence, right?
Your job is to look authority in the eye and not flatter it, right?
To find clever, funny, innocuous ways to point out to authority that you ain't all that.
One of my favorite lines from The Fool is when he says to the old man, he says, you know, uncle, he says, truth's a dog that must kennel.
He must be whipped out while Lady Bitch may stand by the fire and stink.
And it's a dog.
Back to dogs, right?
Truth is the big, smelly dog that nobody wants near them.
We whip it out of the house.
If there's a big dog going to tell us the truth, we whip that dog and let it sleep out in the rain.
But that cute little bitch lapdog, the one who flatters us and purrs at us, right?
If dogs could purr, right?
Flatters us.
And whimpers for us, that's the dog we keep in our laps, right?
Flattery we will keep near us as a dog, right?
But truth we whip out the kennel.
And the way that the fool does this, talk about the antidote to flattery is how the fool handles this.
And it is also a redeeming aspect of King Lear's character that he loves the fool.
He doesn't get angry with him.
At one point he calls him a pestilent gall, right?
But he calls him my boys and they go back and forth with each other.
And it is absolutely haunting to me that by the time Lear is done with the storm, by the time Lear suffers outdoors in the storm, he has come to the truth of what flattery is.
Did you notice what happens?
The fool disappears.
No more fool.
Yeah, he's gone.
It's like the minute Lear comes to understand what the fool's been joking with him about for all those years, the fool just sort of, it's almost as if he vanishes into the ether, right?
He's gone.
Well, it's the old idea that sometimes in stories, it's sort of the fight club thing that other characters are aspects of ourselves.
When you've internalized the truth of the fool, you don't need the external character anymore.
Right.
Right.
I think that's exactly right.
And there's a morality play going on there with that.
You know, this business here, it just moves me so much.
And it comes back to this, how suffering, I mean, I mentioned this as a theodicy.
It's like the Book of Job.
The Book of Job is all over this particular play.
And it's one of those profound truths.
How much of what we know in life do we know because of what we've suffered?
I ask my students this all the time.
How much have you learned from the real happy times in your life?
How much of it do you remember?
If you've come through real suffering, And you can look back at it now with some dispassion.
I think most of us would concede that we've learned a lot more from what we've struggled with than from what went easy for us.
And what does that say about human nature, right?
I mean, it is certainly books of the Bible like Job deal with this thoroughly.
But Lear is like this as well.
I mean, let me give you one more speech from the storm.
When he looks at the shivering body of poor Tom, this beggar, I mean, remember what poor Tom had to do?
In order to hide his identity and not be caught and persecuted as the rebellious son of Duke of Gloucester, he literally takes...
Sprigs of rosemary, nails, splinters of wood, and drives them into his forearms.
Because that's what the bedlam beggars used to do.
They couldn't get alms.
People wouldn't feed them.
So they would literally walk up to farmhouses bleeding with all this detritus jammed into their flesh to get some sympathy.
And so looking at poor Tom, shivering there, In the middle of his own self-pity, he says, poor naked wretches, wheresoever you are that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, how shall your houseless heads, your unfed sides, your looped and windowed raggedness defend you from seasons such as these?
Oh, this line breaks my heart.
Oh, I have taken too little care of this.
When I was king, I could have done something, but it's too late now, right?
I can't help them.
I can't help me, right?
I could have done something about this.
Why does it take his suffering?
It's the old walk a mile in a man's shoes, right?
It's the old Christian imperative, right?
That take the suffering.
Somebody asks for your cloak, give them your shirt as well, right?
You've got to suffer to feel what's suffering.
In fact, that line is in the play, right?
Let me suffer to feel what suffering people play, what other suffering people feel.
The only way you can truly relate to misery is to share it in some ways.
Well, the shortest synopsis of socialism, or you could say charity, that distribution should undo excess and each man have enough.
Boy, talk about taking huge amounts of political theory and compressing them into tiny syllables.
This question of suffering and salvation is very powerfully expressed.
So, Leah, in the first part, Is telling himself, he's a character in his own mind.
Because he says, I was such a wonderful father.
I loved them so much.
I was great to them.
I've been wonderful.
And what that does is it allows him to stoke his raging vanity against his children.
and how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child, and his grim curse on one of his daughters that she would be barren and so on.
While at the same time, the astounding level of verbal abuse, and there are many studies that show that verbal abuse is worse for children than physical abuse, because it creates characters in your head that you have to live with and exercise regularly for the rest of your life.
So at the same time as his verbal fluency is creating this rain of acid on the souls of his children, he sort of turns to one side and basically says, but I'm the victim here.
I'm the wonderful father.
I'm the great father.
And these two stories enable each other, right?
So the more he portrays himself as good, the more he can get enraged at anyone who treats him less than positively.
And then he says, I am a man more sinned against than sinning.
Now, that's an amazing moment because at least he admits he might have sinned a little bit.
You know, the admission of fault is the beginning of wisdom.
And when he says, in looking at poor Tom, he says, I am mightily abused.
I should even die with pity to see another of us.
He is beginning to see that there are people whose suffering is worse than his, that he's putting himself in the context.
Now, you can't put yourself in context if you're appointed to be the king of a powerful kingdom by God, right?
This is back in the time of the divine rights of kings, right?
Where the kings were placed in their position by God who, according to certain texts, you know, validated their every decision and so on.
And the fact that he is reducing himself to common humanity is very powerful.
And the fact that he then has sympathy for others who suffer.
What an amazing way to pull apart the fog of power and the fog of vanity and the fog of delusion to get to the bare-forked animal that we all inhabit this stage.
Yeah, I love that.
When he says his girls give as good as they get, though.
Goneril and Regan, you know, they talk about the verbal abuse.
That cuts both ways.
The way they deal with—in fact, you know, all he has left is his words.
It's funny, isn't it?
That now that he's not king, all he has left is words.
And he chooses those words not to flatter— But to curse.
I mean, even that, I think, is a step in the right direction, right?
I would rather have somebody curse me to my face than flatter me.
They lied to me like a dog, right?
I would rather be cursed than lied to.
Give me a sword fight, don't give me poison.
Exactly.
And so when at one point Lear says, trying to understand his daughter's cruel behavior, because once he gives the two daughters the kingdom, he doesn't misbehave.
I mean, he wants to go back and forth between the two, more or less.
His men are really annoying and loud and grabbing at everything.
It is.
Yeah.
But that goes back to our first point that he – why did he give up the crown when he really didn't need or want to give it up?
But he – one point he says to his daughters, but I gave you all.
But I gave you all.
At which point she responds, and in good time you gave it to, old man.
In other words, had you not given it to us, we would have had to take it from you.
I think we should talk a little bit more about it because the fool is always pointing to it as well.
Why is it?
What does it say about human nature?
You brought up the socialist dichotomy, but I want to go one more quote with you when he's talking about philosophically what suffering does.
Lear says, thinking about his own suffering, actually this is the Earl of Gloucester who suffers too, in a parallel sense to Lear.
He says, let the superfluous, let the lust-dieted man Feel your ordinance.
He's talking to heaven.
He's making a prayer, right?
Let the superfluous man, the lust-dieted man, feel your ordinance.
That man that will not see heaven.
Because he does not feel.
Let him feel, O God, your power quickly.
And if you do that, if you take comfort away from those who cannot feel, what will happen, he says, so then distribution shall undo excess, and every man will have enough.
See, it's not socialist in the sense that some government agent has to do it.
It's God's relationship to us, right?
That in some ways, Positing God exists certainly existed for Shakespeare's world.
If God exists, the more he—and John Donne wrote a beautiful poem about this—the more God exists and the more God loves us, blesses us, if he exists, the less we go to him.
We are much more likely to turn to God if we're suffering.
Than if we're happy.
And so the happier he makes us, the more he insulates us, right?
That was one of the great messages of the book of Job, right?
That the more you have given Job, the Satan says to God, well, the less he pays, why would he, right?
And it's the same thing here in the story of Lear, that Lear has all of these comforts, this power, this authority, all what you call the trappings, right?
The trap of the trappings of existence, but he can't feel.
He has no sympathy.
He has no empathy for people.
It's when that's plucked from him.
Right?
All that power that he gets it.
And so it comes down to the fact of comfort, right?
So what Gloucester is calling for there is not some kind of a socialist remaking of society.
What he's calling for is the human heart, right?
If people, and this is the great injunction of Christ, isn't it?
That no greater love is this than a man is willing to suffer to lay down his life for somebody else.
Can you Love people.
And this is a big question for current government.
Modern progressive liberal government wants to love people without having to do anything, right?
We'll tax everybody else.
We'll take everybody else's wealth.
We'll keep our wealth.
We'll love people.
This is a great crime and punishment theme, too.
We'll love from afar, right?
Versus what Christ says you've got to love face-to-face, right?
And so this is one of those moments where...
The way to fix society is not some organized economic system from the top down.
It is to convince everybody, as individuals, that the suffering of others has to, to some degree, become their suffering for them at least to understand it.
And that passage there from Gloucester, right?
If you, oh Lord, you touch those who are too comfortable with suffering, then they will make sure that those who suffer Whatever they can do for them, they will.
And it becomes very, very libertarian.
It becomes very, very individualistic.
What am I called, because of what God may have gifted me, what am I called to give to others?
And oftentimes the trigger for that is pain.
The trigger for that can't seem to be found in comfort.
And it's always puzzled me.
Why is it that the things, the material things that we want to surround ourselves with, comfort, the things that science can give us?
And I would argue too that vaccinations and organ transplants, these are critically important things.
I say nothing bad about them.
But science, if you think about it from one perspective, material science, You could argue that its whole function is to increase comfort for people.
If all my teeth rot out of my head by the time I'm 40, rather than being able to have fluoride to keep them, if I die at 50 instead of 80 because I don't have medicine, if three of my six babies die in childbirth, okay, that's horrible.
But I still have a moral obligation, don't I, to people?
Whether I live to 60 or 30, whether all my babies grow up or not, whether I get that transplant I need to live an extra 10 years, I still have a moral obligation to people.
And is it possible that the materialist solutions to culture, and Lear seems to find this out, the material argument, a material culture that argues that science is the fastest way to improve human lives, and it certainly is the fastest way to make us eat better, live better, but Is there a price to pay for simply materialistic answers to things?
It's the whole socialist argument.
Socialism is by definition materialist, right?
Forget heaven, forget God, let's make heaven on earth.
And how do we do that?
I loved, loved, loved, loved.
And I sent a note to Mike about this.
I loved your musings on Satan and socialism.
I mean, I know you're going to do crime and punishment coming up here, but it's the Brothers Karamazov, too.
It's the whole Grand Inquisitor scene that makes exactly the argument that's being made here, that when we put our focus primarily on material solutions to material problems, We become paradoxically less empathetic to people, not more.
We become paradoxically more distanced from people, not closer to them, right?
And so that's why I always lay ideologically, when I read my marks, I always lay it alongside the Gospels.
Because you think about Christ's message, it was exactly the opposite.
If Christ is who he says he is, he is the most powerful creature to ever walk the earth, and yet he lived in profound discomfort, died in discomfort, right?
Lived a life where he put aside, like without being asked to, he put aside the flattery, he put aside the trappings of his eternal power to become a man like other men, to breed, to bleed, to suffer like other men.
And so there's something really powerful, I think, that Shakespeare's doing in this.
It goes back to the Book of Job in the Old Testament, it moves forward through the Gospels, and it really does, I think, confront post-modernity.
For me, all the great tragedies, not only do they look back to the Christian world of the past, but they anticipate.
A world of pure materialism sometime in the future.
Macbeth does that, right?
In his whole formulation of evil.
Evil is just politics, right?
The witches, they're not supernatural figures.
They're just my own private lottery to tell me what's going to happen next.
And so in that regard, what I love about Shakespeare's plays, and we talked about this when we did Hamlet, there's no end to the way you interpret them.
There's no one spin that's going to give you a complete picture of them.
You can come at them from a thousand different angles, but ultimately what I love about Shakespeare's play is that they are completely steeped in the lore, the legend, the theology, the philosophy of the past, yet they are such wonderful primers for so much that's happening today, right?
The conversation we're just having is very, very relevant and very modern, however you choose to answer it, whether you come down materially or you come down theologically on the issue.
The question of the daughters, I'll circle back.
Well, first of all, female evil is something that is prevalent in Shakespeare, as male evil is as well, and the obvious ones, Lady Macbeth and so on, but female evil is something that I have talked about repeatedly in my show.
not because I have any problems with women.
I just want to give them the full capacity for human choices that men are granted, and men can be evil, and women can be evil.
And we can see this very strongly in this play, because they basically complain that their father was not a good king, took too long to give them power.
But then when they get power, they're horrible.
And, you know, that to me is that there have been sort of arguments put forward that when women got the vote, this is when you saw the real growth in social programs, because women being dependent on a steady flow of resources, if they have kids, generally will tend slightly more towards security than towards freedom. generally will tend slightly more towards security than towards freedom.
Men need economic freedom to go out and get the resources to provide for their families.
But women who've chosen wrong or whose husband leaves them or has vices or dies or whatever without insurance, they need the steady flow of resources to feed their kids.
So they'll generally gravitate somewhat more towards the welfare state.
And this reminds me of the line from Edgar.
The gods are just and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us.
Don't we want a society where everyone's safe, where everyone's secure, where nobody suffers too much for bad choices?
And that question of how much suffering should we, quote, allow in society is really powerful and a deep question.
You said earlier, you know, they turn him out in the storm and so on.
It's like, well, kind of, but kind of not.
Because they say to him, listen, you're welcome here.
Just don't turn this into some greasy frat house.
Like, that's all we're asking for, is, you know, enough for the John Belushi comedy with, like, a hundred guys who are, you know, banging the wenches and eating the food and, you know, peeing in the sinks and stuff like that.
They have reasonable requests for the restraint of parental power, given that he's getting old and has given up his power, and they have other things to do other than manage his vanity.
And he's like, well, that's it, I'm leaving, you know?
And it's the old thing that parents used to do, you know, when you're a kid, and you're like, I'm running away, and you're like, here you go, right?
I mean...
Here are the consequences.
How much do we allow people to suffer the consequences of their bad decisions?
So that not only do they learn better decisions, but they serve as a warning to others.
And I wonder, I get the sense, looking at it theologically, that he goes to heaven at the end.
Now, I don't think he would have gone to heaven at the beginning at all.
Because he hadn't learned to love his children.
He hadn't learned basic empathy.
He hadn't learned the lessons of Christ.
You know, to look at the mote in your own eye rather than regarding the beam in everyone else's.
He learned humility.
He learned humanity.
He learned to love.
He learned to tell the truth.
You know, this line that always used to make me cry.
I am a very foolish, fond old man, and to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
That actual statement of truth, to the point where he's happy to go to jail rather than go back to court, where he says to Cordelia, you know, we're going to sit, we're going to sing, we're going to tell old stories, we're going to laugh, and we're going to watch all the bullshit that goes on in the courtroom.
Who's in?
Who's out?
Who's right?
Who's wrong?
And we won't care about it at all.
He's left the plane of politics.
He's left the plane of manipulation and power.
And he wants connection with his child.
And he's willing to live in a cell with his child.
Then be master of an entire kingdom.
Is that not how he steps into heaven?
And how does he get there?
He's put out into the storm.
And he puts himself out into the storm.
Because his kids say, you're welcome to stay.
Just don't be an idiot.
Don't be a jerk.
Don't be an asshole.
And he's like, no, I'm gonna be an asshole.
It's like, well, welcome to the storm.
And the storm cures him.
Them allowing him to suffer the consequences of his own immaturity and vanity cures him and paves the way to a heaven that he wouldn't have achieved otherwise.
I love it.
And, you know, the entitlement.
The one thing that you left out, didn't get to, is what happens when we don't let people suffer the consequences of their actions.
They become entitled, right?
They feel that there should not be consequences to actions.
Look at what's happening in the modern world.
The more comfortable we come as a society, the more of our rudimentary needs are met without us having to lift a finger to have them met, the more entitled we become.
This idea that with suffering comes awareness.
I love what the fool says to him.
You mentioned he was kind of a baby when he stormed out.
It is true he stormed out on his own, but no sooner did he storm out than Regan said, bar the door.
He's not coming back in.
Even if he changes his heart, he ain't getting back in.
So again, they give as good as they get, but he stormed out like the little child.
But again, he became king when he was a little child.
And once he became king, even before he became king, nobody told him the truth.
In fact, it was little boys, little peasant boys who got spanked when he acted up.
So this idea that for Lear, when it finally crashes around him, I love what the fool says right before the storm.
He says, if you were my fool, uncle, I'd have you beaten for being old before your time.
You should not have got old until you had gotten wise.
And what is there in Lear's world?
There is no suffering.
There is no deprivation.
Nobody doesn't like him, at least to his face.
He goes without nothing.
He has the best of everything.
And so he's entitled.
Even as a king, he's entitled beyond what kings are entitled to.
It's not until you take it away.
It's like raising kids.
If every time your kid screws up or does something wrong, you ignore it and reward them.
If you shield them from the consequences of their bad choices, you're going to raise Nasty, spoiled brats.
And we're breeding a generation of spoiled brats because we keep telling them, not only are you not accountable for your actions, you should be able to shut down other people's actions if it makes you feel bad.
If somebody achieves more than you do, if somebody has more than you do, if somebody works harder than you do, you have the right to shut them down because it makes you feel bad.
That's the progressive rot that we're in now.
We need We're good to go.
So we don't need a community.
We don't need to be involved in each other's lives.
We don't need to care about each other.
We don't need the human contact that cures mental dysfunction.
Money does not cure mental dysfunction.
If money cured mental dysfunction, Howard Hughes would have died the sanest man alive.
And so the idea that we just throw money at dysfunction and we make it all better.
No, we need contact.
We need involvement.
We need connection.
You know, I do hours and hours of call-in shows every week because I want people to understand it's the connection of ideas and compassion that changes the world, not just this Vice of, well, the poor are now taken care of, so I don't have to muddy my little white silk gloved hands because, you know, the government is throwing money at the problem.
And it's just, it's making society decay.
It's making society, you know, morals are what we need because the world is challenging.
You take away the challenge.
And, you know, it's like having your leg in a cast for three years.
It comes out, you have no muscles left whatsoever, and your tendons are drooping down like old sea ropes.
So this idea that we can remove suffering and make a better world is one of these things that we love in our mind, but when enacted in society, turns into the exact opposite, you know?
And there's a great line, I can't recall it exactly, in Lear, where it says, you know, we're not the first who with the best intentions caused the worst.
And this is very powerful.
And this, not that we have to end here, but the last line of the play.
If I'd had a spiritual knife and opened up my chest and carved it into my heart when I first read it, and I read it like an elephant leg just stamping on my heart, because at the end of it, and we think of the political correctness, think of the riots that are occurring when conservative speakers come to campuses, think of the hate speech laws for people who are pointing out simple facts about society and so on.
And the powerful line is this.
And compare it to what happens at the beginning, which is all this mealy-mouthed, oily flattery and so on, where people are just manipulating each other with language.
And after this amount of suffering, the truth is spoken.
And he says, the weight of this sad time we must obey.
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
And the stripping down of manipulation, because all that happens at the beginning is manipulation, a humiliation followed by violence, which I want to talk about in a second.
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
You know, this political correctness is really blinding us to very essential truths within society, and we are now going faster and faster down an icy hill with thicker and thicker blindfolds on, and we need to speak...
We need to speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
This self-censorship that is largely brought about as a result of the bullying left, the new inquisition against contrary opinions, is something that we have to push back.
And I remember reading that, and when I read that, I was like, you know what?
I am damn well going to live that way.
If I'm going to learn from this imaginary suffering from hundreds of years ago, that is the lesson we must learn.
Speak the truth.
Don't speak in conformity.
Don't speak in fear.
Don't self-censor.
Be honest.
And if it gets you attacked, it's still better than the alternative.
And that's why I was willing to exonerate Cordelia a little bit, because she does do that in the opening scene of the play.
She doesn't tell him anything hostile.
At one point she says to her father, what have my sister's husbands if they do love you all?
Happily, when I marry, Cordelia says, that man who takes my hand will take half my love and care, half my concern.
Why have these sisters husbands if they love you all?
I love you the way a daughter should.
She tells them the absolute truth.
The problem is, I think, not her honesty.
And Kent is another one.
We haven't talked about Kent.
The Earl of Kent is the one retainer, the high-ranking retainer that Kent has.
That Lear has, who looks Lear in the eye and says, don't give your kingdom to those two girls.
Kent looks Lear in the eye and says, as long as I can voice clamor from my throat, old man, I will tell you, you do wrong.
Don't banish this girl, Cordelia.
Banish those two.
And at one point, Lear says to him, come not between the dragon and his wrath, Kent, and all this overblown hyperbolic garbage.
Kent won't flatter him.
At one point, Kent says, see better, Lear.
Or let me remain the true blank of your eyes.
If we look at Cordelia as his ideal heart, you mentioned that at the end of the play, he wants to go, when he's reunited with Cordelia, politics doesn't matter, money doesn't matter, we too will sing like birds.
Let us live in a cage.
We too will sing like birds in a cage.
We too, all we need is each other, and we can talk about who's in and who's out.
We can just love each other.
So at the end of the play, he gets his heart back.
Kent is his eyes in some ways.
Let me remain the true blank of you.
You won't feel correctly without her, Kent says, but you're not going to see correctly without me either.
So Kent, after he's banished, he risks his own life, he comes back in disguise, and he sort of shadows Lear to make sure he's okay.
And so at the end of the play, Kent and Lear, the eyes and the heart, come back to him.
And he can now see the world the way it is.
And because he sees the suffering of others, he can now feel what it's like to be back with the daughter.
She risked everything.
We didn't mention that.
She didn't stay in France.
She got wind of what was happening to her father, what those two girls were doing to him.
And she came back across the channel with an army.
Her husband, the king of France, got called back because of some plot.
And so without the king of France, Cordelia is captured, taken prisoner.
But before that happens, she finds Lear in his madness.
And there's that great, horrifying, beautiful scene when the old man is lying in her lap, his head is in her lap, and she's stroking his hair.
And he opens his eyes and says, you can't be her.
I gave you—those other two daughters hated me, Lear says— I gave them no cause, but you, you have every right to hate me.
And so the old man, he gets down on his knees and he says, forgive me.
And she says, no, don't.
No, no, no, no.
You have no forgiveness.
And they have this incredible reconciliation, the heart and the eyes.
You got to have the eyes in your head to see the way the world is.
And that means any system like the progressive system, like socialism, that seeks to freeze out suffering as something alien to man.
Why were so many of the great novels of the 20th century dystopias warning us about what happens from too sterile and too materialistic a worldview?
And they're all warning.
And men of the left, people like Orwell, people like Ken Kesey in One Flew Over the Coop, these are men of the left, what used to be staunch liberalism.
Warning us that this kind of materialism, this antiseptic, nurse ratchet materialism, this argument that we can solve all human wants and needs simply by giving people stuff, it is worse than starvation.
It is worse than freezing to death in the cold, right?
Better to go without air conditioning in the summer than to not have those pivotal lessons about what it means to be human.
We're back to that.
What is the bare forked animal?
What are we?
That line that Lear says, the wool, the shirts we wear made from wool, that wool we weren't born with.
The perfume, I love that one.
You owe the cat no perfume.
They used to make civet, probably still do.
From the anal glands of cats, right?
So they would take the anal gland of a cat, ironically, and make this really refined perfume.
You stink!
Without the borrowing from the animal, you stink!
Without the borrowing from the sheep, you freeze!
Without the borrowing from the cow, you have no leather, right?
And so ultimately, that line that always gets me, that makes me teary-eyed, is the one where Lear says, the first time, the very first time we sent the air as babies, we wail and cry.
We don't laugh.
The first time we scent the air, we wall and cry.
And that should teach us, he says.
And that should teach us that we have come to a veil of tears.
We have not come to some experimental paradise.
And so I keep coming back to that in this play.
It's the lesson of Job, too.
People, maybe we'll talk about Job one day, because that's a good one.
The way it ends, people think it's a Hollywood buyout.
After all of Job's suffering, God sort of gives him back everything, but he doesn't give him back everything.
The real power of the book of Job, and it's the same power here as the epiphany, You may recall that for 40 pages, Job gripes about how unfair God is.
And so what does God do?
Because of Job's righteousness, he shows up.
And so Job now sees God.
I mean, God is in his presence.
And God says, what do you want to say to me?
And Job says, now that I see you with my eyes, rather than just hear you, Now I know I have nothing to complain about.
I repent in dust and ashes.
Thank you, right?
That what Job gets is not children back.
It's not money back.
What Job gets at the end of the play is something that none of us get on this earth, or evidently not righteous enough to get on this earth.
A one-to-one face-to-face meeting with that which supersedes and transcends.
That's the epiphany of this play as well.
And off you lendings, right?
Everything we have in this world is borrowed from something else.
We come in naked and afraid, and we go out naked and afraid.
And that's the bare-forked animal.
And I've also noticed that when people...
Shakespeare's psychologist is, to me, just astounding.
So when people experience humiliation, they often react with murderous rage.
And we see this happening right after the speech where Lear says, we come into this world crying, and he's like, I want to go kill someone!
And it's the same thing with Edmund at the beginning.
He's like, well, I'm humiliated because I'm born outside of wedlock, and I'm, you know, so...
To hell with it.
I'm just going to go become some murderous...
Like the humiliation followed by the rage.
And it's always struck me when Lear talks about the magistrate who's whipping the whore.
And he's whipping her because he wishes to use her sexually.
And, you know, you think of this where some of the sort of televangelists are railing against particular vices, which almost inevitably, you know, they're going to end up manifesting themselves.
So to me, this is the part...
That I remain very ambivalent about, which is good, you know, that's the mark of great art.
I started off by saying intergenerational conflict is the key in King Lear and Shakespeare does it magnificently.
Intergenerational conflict is at the heart of this play.
I mean, all of the subplots revolve around it, right?
I mean, you have Edgar with his father.
You have the daughters with their father.
You have children having conflicts with their elders all the time.
And this tension, to me, is very powerful because...
Lear's daughters have criticisms of him and have contempt for him and think they can do better.
And then they step into his throne and create hell on earth.
Not just for themselves, but for everyone.
You know, with Shakespeare, there's all these bodies piling up in the aisles, you know, like the people you don't see.
You know, I remember when I played...
Macbeth, I remember chatting with the director saying, you know, one thing I'm having a little trouble with, you know, Macbeth stalks in at the beginning of the play having just hacked down 40 peasants with his greatsword because he's got armor and they don't and he's just going through them like a combine harvester and he's not bothered, it nobody's bothered he's a great guy he's a hero but you stab one old guy and suddenly you know the anyway it's just one of these things that you have to remember in shakespeare's all these bodies in the aisles that you know but it's only when the rich and powerful die that anyway that's natural
but um the young are so frustrated with the old and the young want to say well we can do it better than you and part of it's the stunning kruger effect when you're not good at stuff you think you're better than you are and you can't really judge competence so the young and i sort of think about the 60s here you know where the oh you know the the 50s were toast so square man let's have free love let's have sexual experimentation let's have communes let's have collective ownership let's have a welfare state let's you know
just the idea that the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years of painfully developed human history you know and and some of the basic uh i did this rant recently on on on europe that europe you know the wages of sin is death and europe violated um i can't even think how many of the ten commandments but quite a lot um False gods before me, right?
The state before virtue, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness, thou shalt not envy too much, right?
Socialism's driven a lot by resentment and envy.
And so they have sinned, and the wages of sin may indeed be death.
So the young get really frustrated because they don't understand the reasons for the restraint of the elderly.
They don't understand the reasons for the social rules because they haven't lived the consequences, whereas their elders have.
At the same time, the elders often dominate through power rather than virtue, and the young resent that and say, well, it's not...
It's not virtue that command me.
You'll tell me it's virtue that commands me.
It's power that commands me.
And so this tension between the generations is magnificently portrayed in this play.
And in a sense, neither of them win.
Because it's not like people say, well, let's go back to Lear's thing.
You know, let's just find ourselves a new Lear, and off we go.
We'll go back to the way things are.
Both the...
The power, instead of the virtue of the elderly and the inexperience and resentment of the young, neither of those are validated in the play.
Simple honesty and bare humanity wins the day.
And that, to me, philosophy is, you know, the sort of pursuit of truth and honesty and empirical evidence should be what mediates disputes, and particularly between the generations, because the elders have complaints and the youth...
I have complaints.
The youth say to the elders, why the hell did you set up this crazy system?
Our schools were terrible.
We're horribly in debt.
We have unfunded liabilities that make me a slave and so on.
And then the older say, well, you guys are all socialists and we're the ones who had to vote for Brexit and the breakup of collectivism and so on.
But that doesn't seem to be a good way to mediate these disputes between generations.
And to me, I think that's one of the great powers of the play, that there are intergenerational conflicts that we need simple truths to begin to mediate.
The vanity of the old, who don't like it when they're questioned, of course.
I mean, they set up a whole system, they've invested in it, they've...
It's their cathedral.
It's what they've built.
And now we all live in it.
And people are like, oh, there's dust on this mantle and there's chips over here and there are cracks over here and there's a hole in the roof up there.
You guys suck.
And they're like, well, what do you mean?
It's a beautiful thing.
This protected you.
The civilization protected you the whole way that you were growing up.
We inherited it.
We've worked to improve it.
Who are you to nitpick?
You're young.
You don't know anything.
This conflict between the generations, I think, has been really suppressed at the moment, largely through debt and complications and so on.
You can shore up just about anything if you're willing to borrow enough and postpone conflicts and so on.
But that, I think, is the real power that the play has at the moment.
There are conflicts between the generations that are ill-expressed at the moment, and I think this shows the consequences of keeping them repressed for too long.
Well, I think that's exactly right.
And what bothers me about the modern generations, you go back to the 60s, is that the young kids now equate the sinful people with the civilization, right?
The young people are unable to see beyond the corrupt president or the feckless congressman or the failed judge— They see that as the representative of the civilization.
They don't see the institutions.
So what bothers me is these young kids are not just throwing out their politicians, not just throwing out the customs of the older generation.
They want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, right?
Because we have greedy people in this society, we have to throw out capitalism.
And completely unaware, like you said, of the civilization.
We have created a civilization that goes on in spite of the bad actors in it.
That still provides and makes opportunities for people, even as the people at the top change.
That's what bothers me.
But I would go back and say one thing.
I don't think the end is a throwaway.
You think about the one character even more than Cordelia and Kent.
Who's the one character in the play who evinces absolute goodness, who suffers more even than King Lear does?
It's Edgar, right?
King Lear lost his crown.
Edgar loses everything.
King Lear still has a coat in the storm.
He still has a fool as a friend, right?
Edgar has nobody.
He has to change his identity.
His father has his eyes gouged out, right?
His father has left...
He's got to try to save his father's life from suicide.
He's the guy at the end of the play...
Who becomes the next king?
So what happens at the end of the play is what you exactly said should happen, that the person who's taking power at the end of the play is not just another King Lear.
It's somebody who has suffered more than anybody else in the play and whose empathy, because of his suffering, has been magnified and intensified.
He puts everybody before himself.
If there's one person, if you want to have a monarchy, if you have to do it, maybe the one person you'd want is exactly somebody like Edgar.
Right, right.
The little pinpricks of truth too, you know, when you speak truth to the world, particularly in a public sphere, this also happens in private spheres as well, but when you speak truth to the world, it often feels like you really are...
Throwing paper airplanes into a hurricane.
I saw it for a moment.
Now it's off in Kansas.
And one of the things to me is a very powerful moment in the play.
And when I first read it, I had to reread it a couple of times to try and figure out what the hell happened.
Because you get these little pinpricks of truth coming in from the fool.
You know, you should not have made your daughters your mother.
Hey, remember when you didn't care whether your kids were frowning too much?
Now, of course, there should be a little bit of care on the parental side.
But these little pinpricks of truth.
And at one point he says, you know, why...
Why do we have a nose?
Well, to keep your eyes on either side of your face so that what you can't look into you can smell out.
And so these little pinpricks of truth that go in, and then Lear says, and it seems to come out of nowhere.
I did her wrong.
I did her wrong, referring to Cordelia.
This is something that's important for those who are in, particularly in a public sphere, trying to speak truth to power, trying to speak truth to, you know, sometimes a hostile world.
You don't know which seeds are going to sprout.
You have to throw your seeds out.
Like a farmer, you don't know.
You try and find the earth, you try and find the rich earth, the right conditions, the good weather, the shade or the sun or whatever the plants need.
But you're just throwing stuff out there.
And the fool is rejected and threatened with whipping, repeatedly.
And I don't think that's just a joke.
Like, I think if he really offends the king, he's going to get whipped.
I mean, this guy is like, he's like Robin Williams at the court of King John Ull.
You know, I mean, this is like really, really tough, tough stuff.
But he is able to drop enough drops of truth that he gets through to Lear in a very oblique way.
And this is an important thing to remember when you're speaking truth.
A lot of people will ignore you, threaten to whip you and so on.
But at some point, it may well penetrate in ways, in a sort of brain alchemy that I'll never understand.
I don't think will ever be understandable.
Sometimes you reconfigure people remotely so that they're open to the truth and you can make silly jokes about oysters and your nose and goofy things like that.
And somehow it wires someone up with a conscience.
I did her wrong.
Now, the fool ignores that, for reasons I don't quite understand, but that is important to remember that, yeah, it feels like you're throwing paper airplanes into a hurricane, but the effects that you have with a little...
You don't know which statement is going to be the key that opens the lock to someone's heart, and that's why you have to keep doing...
What you're doing, speaking the truth, even if, and especially if, you feel you're not getting anywhere because you don't hear every little key that turns in everybody's head that opens their heart, that opens their conscience, that opens their empathy, that sets them on a road to virtue.
And what you do hear is a lot of people who threaten to whip you, but that's sort of the name of the game.
There's a great scene that falls in exactly with what you said where the fool is standing between Lear on one side and Goneril and Regan on the other, right?
And Goneril and Regan are going to have him whipped for telling the truth because the fool looks them in the eye and calls them cuckoo birds, right?
Who bite off the heads of their fathers, right?
He tells the truth about Goneril and Regan.
They threaten to whip him.
He lies to Lear to cover something truth up, and Lear says, I'm going to whip you.
At that point, the fool looks between the two of them and he says, I marvel what kin you and your daughters are.
They would have me whipped for telling the truth.
You would have me whipped for lying, and sometimes...
I am whipped for holding my peace, at which point it's a masturbation joke, right?
He tells a great truth.
He defined flattery.
They will have me whipped for telling the truth.
You will have me whipped for lying.
Is there a better definition of that?
But look at how he undercuts it, right?
And sometimes, because the punishment for masturbating was whipping, right?
And so, you know, fools carried that big stick, right, with a little fool's head on it.
Couldn't you just see the fool say, you know, you will have me whipped for lying.
They will have me whipped for telling the truth.
Puts the stick between his legs, right?
And sometimes.
But what gets me, and the other thing you said that just resonated with me, I loved your metaphor about the seeds.
A wise man a long time ago said something exactly the same.
The sower goes out to sow.
And some of the seed falls on fallow ground, and some of the seed falls on the...
On the pavement where the birds come and eat it and some of the seed sprouts up, but because it has no roots, the sun comes and burns it up.
You don't know, the sower said, it's one of Christ's parables, right?
You don't know which of those seeds you plant are going, but when you do, he says, Christ says in the parable, when you do find a seed that lands in the right ground, it will breed a thousandfold, right?
It will bear a thousandfold.
I think that's a beautiful follow-up to what you said about casting the seed.
The fool there does a great job, but he's always, because of the perilous nature of being a truth teller, though he's got to punctuate it with the bawdy joke.
He tells the truth.
And who's worse?
Lear, it's got to be the girls, right?
You girls are going to whip me for telling you the truth.
You, old man, will whip me for lying.
At least there's a certain...
And all throughout the play, it tips to Lear, doesn't it?
Our sympathy tips to him, even though he's behaved badly.
Our understanding tips to him.
Everything tips to him.
And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that The Fool, one of the characters we respect tremendously, he never loses...
Remember when he first...
He's Lear after he's given up power.
He walks in and there's Kent and Lear standing there.
Immediately, the fool takes off his fool's cap and he hands it to Kent.
He says, here.
And Kent says, what, do you think I'm a fool?
You would have to be.
You need to wear my coxcomb, he says.
That's what you get for following a man who's out of favor.
Right?
And he never abandons Lear, even though his own moral, right, You're a fool if you stay loyal to a man who no longer has power, but the fool always does, or he never leaves him.
Oh, that's beautiful.
And it reminds me of what Whitaker Chambers, a great formerly communist, then Christian writer, when he decided to expose communism, when he decided to start down the path which eventually led to McCarthy's examinations of infiltrations of the U.S. government by communists.
I've got a poll presentation for those who are listening called The Truth About McCarthyism, which you should check out.
But he said to his wife, he said, I'm leaving the winning side for the losing side.
But of course, if enough people do that, it's no longer the losing side.
So to sum up, I think the complaints that young have to the old have a lot to do with the fact that the old have avoided suffering by exploiting the young.
And I think about this in terms of massive expansions in the welfare state government spending, the welfare welfare state, particularly in America and other places.
It's more the welfare state because America took the military burden in Europe and particularly protecting it against aggression.
But the avoidance of suffering, and the suffering is psychological in many ways as well.
If you want to have giant social programs, you should at least pay the taxes to support them, right?
But if you want the giant social programs and pass along the debt to the next generation, if you want big retirement programs, Pension schemes, if you want free healthcare, but you're not willing to pay for it, then you want the fruits of virtue without the work of virtue.
And the young have legitimate complaints that the old were not willing to make rational choices, to make reasonable choices, but rather just...
Fulfilled greed.
Fulfilled greed for material resources, but even more fulfilled greed for the feelings of virtue.
You know, what the young folks these days call virtue signaling.
You know, like, I want migrants!
You know, no idea of how this is all going to work in the long run.
And so the frustration that the young have, that the old have avoided suffering at the expense of the young, I think is really important.
And I've said many times that the older generation do owe significant apologies to the younger generation.
And what moves me so much about Leah's apology to Cordelia, it's not manipulative at all.
There are times, of course, when you confront people with the wrongs they've done.
They'll be like, well, sorry, you know, I'm sorry that it upset you.
You know, just that mealy-mouthed, non-apology stuff.
But...
Lear has a continuity of apology.
You know, I've done you wrong.
I apologize.
I will keep apologizing.
I beg forgiveness and so on.
It stays with him.
And I think that one of the lessons that people can get, I think, out of the play at the moment is that...
Yeah, the schools deteriorated.
Yeah, social conditions deteriorated.
Society deteriorated.
Culture deteriorated.
Finances deteriorated.
The environment, in some ways, deteriorated.
I think that the old do have to take some responsibility for their avoidance of suffering, which is really pushing additional suffering onto the young.
And that...
The power of that play, I know this sounds very sort of abstract and so on, but I think it's going to become quite real in the not-too-distant future, that suffering deferred is suffering escalated, and it is unjust to ask the young to pay for the sins of their elders.
But at the same time, the young should also be more curious about the reasons why the elders had the rules that they had.
You know, the rules around, you know, hey, get married before you have kids and so on.
This all has been considered ridiculous to the point where Children are growing up in majority single-mom households now, with all the attendant psychological and economic distress that that results in.
And this conflict, this is why I think the play has a special power right now, because I think that there is going to be a significant intergenerational conflict that is coming up, and we need to be able to listen to each other, the generations, in order to have it not escalate to something very, very unpleasant.
The thing that I would add to that, and I think it's a beautiful sociological explanation of this tension.
I want to go one step further with it.
I think the biggest sin of the older generations right now, the biggest sin, is that we are withholding suffering from the younger.
One of the major lessons of King Lear is, there is no fool like an old fool.
If you wait until you're 80 years old, To suffer enough to understand and to feel empathy, right?
Because I think we both sort of concluded this, that it's very hard to be meaningfully empathetic if you've never suffered.
I think that's something we can both agree on.
And if you wait until you're an old man to suffer to begin to feel empathy, well, then that's pathetic.
But I think it's a grave, grave danger.
For this generation, because the welfare entitlements are all protecting kids, right?
The old people aren't just taking care of themselves, right?
They're taking care of their children.
They're getting food stamps.
Under Obamacare, kids are children until they're 27 years old.
The schools have become babysitting factories.
The colleges now have basically given up being faculty and let the kids do what they want.
So what I think the biggest danger of the adult generation is, is that they are withholding suffering from their kids.
They are not letting them suffer the consequences of their actions, even in small things.
They are not giving them boundaries.
They are not giving them discipline.
And so I could live with my kids being spoiled, but what I can't live with is my kids...
Being grown up in a climate where they have no empathy.
That's what you're seeing on college campuses.
These kids, I agree with you.
Some of their political grievances are legitimate.
Some of their concerns are absolutely things that we should pay serious attention to.
But what bothers me is they have no empathy.
They have no ability to listen to anybody else.
They are utterly impatient to hear anybody's answer, including liberal answers other than their own.
And that's because we've raised a generation of king layers.
Little kids who are their own little kings.
We don't spank them.
We don't yell at them.
We don't discipline them.
We don't ground them.
We provide them with all sorts of material comforts.
We give them all this technology.
We tell them a self-esteem education, how wonderful they are.
And then when they encounter difficult situations, even things that you and I would not consider difficult at all, they collapse.
They become fragile.
The same kids – look at this.
Tell me this isn't King Lear.
The same kids who, on the one hand, are so delicate and fragile that if confronted with a worldview they don't like, they need coloring books and puppies.
Those same kids, when they have the advantage over an enemy, they are vicious to the point that they'll attack a liberal professor at Middlebury College and twist her neck, right?
That's Lear.
You made a brilliant point yourself earlier.
This is the same Lear who acts like a little baby and then rages like a Navy admiral in the Battle of Midway, right?
It's And why?
Because he does not have the perspective that empathy brings through suffering.
I would argue we're raising a generation of 13-year-old King Lears now, and the longer it happens before they suffer, the less they'll be able to deal with it because, like you said, that check is going to come due real soon.
Yeah, I mean, I obviously would push back against the spanking and the yelling, but I would say that this nobody can fail, everyone gets socially advanced, and the lack of competitive sports, the lack of being out there in the neighborhood with kids, you know, this sort of unstructured, parentless, or at least adult authority-free playtime in nature and so on.
Societies have really, I mean, there are no neighborhoods left anymore.
This is really tragic and there's this general anxiety about the neighborhoods and stay in and stay close and all of that.
So yeah, there's a lack of, yeah, I always hated this, of course, and everyone does.
Everyone does when you're a little kid and you're going through suffering and the, what do the adults say?
It's going to build character.
It's like, damn it, I hate that they were right about that.
But it's absolutely true.
Well, listen, thanks very much for a call.
It's great to be able to talk about this stuff.
And I'm really hoping, you know, you can get this movie available to you.
You can read it, of course.
Reading it is a fantastic way to consume it.
But if you don't want to read it, you can put up the subtitles.
You can get it on iTunes.
You can get it in other places.
Watch this.
You know, be patient with it.
Let it grow into you and...
There are so many fantastic versions out there.
There's a version with Gandalf, Ian McKellen.
If I remember rightly, there's a version with Patrick Stewart.
There's a version with Paul Schofield.
There's a version with Laurence Olivier.
There's a version with...
I mean, there's just fantastic versions out there.
Try a couple.
You can dip into the sort of previews on YouTube and see which ones you like.
Because, you know, they all have different takes and different approaches.
But this is a play that is...
Absolutely gonna pay you back, not just in the couple of hours of incredibly intense entertainment and emotional power that the play contains.
It's the kind of stuff that can laser-like carve into your heart and give you maxims to live by in your life.
It is a fantastic education and a very, very powerful experience.
Just wanted to remind people, please drop past what Dr.
