If you were to ask any random person in history about the story of King Lear (sometimes spelled Leir), chances are they'd be describing a sort of comedy, a genre-bending romance in which bad things happen to good people, yes, but in which the natural progression of old age and bad decisions is quiet retirement and the hope of a new generation.
The King Lear/Leir story, for Shakespeare's audiences, was pre-Arthur, pre-Merlin, a kind of origin story about what Britain was like before the Romans and the French invaded, and very much a story in which good triumphed over evil. It was quintessentially British in nature -- a unifying story equivalent to those of Lancelot, Chaucer's Tales, and Robin Hood. So when Shakespeare's company showed his King Lear on December 26th, 1606, it was a shock to the system, an adaptation of the material so appalling that we might consider a blood bath serving as the end of a Disney cartoon as a kind of modern-day equivalent.
But Shakespeare's play didn't entirely come out of nowhere. December 1606 was just a year after the near-miss of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and certainly Shakespeare was drafting the play in the aftermath of that thwarted terrorist attack that read in the news of the day like something of an apocalypse. James, the new King of England and continuing King of Scotland, framed the November 5 attacks as a triumph of good over evil, a product of his holy discernment about demons and witches and conspirators at work in his kingdom.
James's response to the planned attack was to double down on his goal of unifying the countries of England, Wales, and Scotland. There was incredible resistance, partly along nationalist and religious lines, and by Christmas 1606, Parliament was intractably bound up over the situation. James, nothing if not a bit of an iconoclast, trapped between a political stalemate on one side and his unification rhetoric on the other, sat down to watch his theatre company put on a play. And in walks Shakespeare with this one.
Shakespeare's Lear partly a cautionary tale about the perils of a divided kingdom would scratch James's itch. James and his court could certainly latch onto the propagandistic and nationalistic nature of the play as a ratification of their politics. Shakespeare's treatment of the Poor Tom character, possessed by demons of his own making, would certainly have made James lean forward in his throne. But there's also little doubt that Shakespeare's play holds a kind of mirror up to the politics of that moment, requiring the viewers to confront an apocalypse, complete with its own fools and madmen, in which the anointed king, one mythic enough to summon nature itself, cannot escape his consequences. The problem, you see, is that Lear's madness has no method in't. Beginning to sound familiar?
Fast forward.
In the post 9/11 era, the specter of terrorism, the danger of unwelcome foreign influence, the nationalization of religion, nationalism itself, and the rise of charismatic leaders who seek both to unify and divide -- all serve as a stand-in for the kind of context for which the play was written. And so we're here today to confront the eschatology of our current moment as well.
I can't think of a better way to explore a play about unifying-where-there-is-no-unity than doing it with two theatre companies, one from the liberal technological mecca that is the Research Triangle and one that lives in the shadow of Fort Bragg. The result is a sort of black-and-tan cocktail, an honest pint of something that tastes very much like two things. A pint of the best bitter and a dash of sweet tea, perhaps, or an apocalypse with a little sugar. Enough to remind us we're still alive after all this, that ours and the nation's heart still beats, defibrillating us in the way all good beverages do.
