On August 18, 2025, at 3 pm Eastern Time, Princeton University Professor Rhodri Lewis will be our guest for a Casual Conversation on King Lear by William Shakespeare. Professor Lewis’s faculty listing may be found here, with a description of his background and his interests: https://english.princeton.edu/people/rhodri-lewis .
The Freshman English Seminar that each of us took 60 years ago (although a few APed out) had a curriculum of three extremely demanding works, each of a different genre: Milton’s Paradise Lost, a poem; Melville’s Moby-Dick, a novel; and Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play. We have already had a Casual Conversation with a Dartmouth Milton scholar, and Melville’s work will be discussed in an upcoming Casual Conversation. Lear is on deck for this Monday at 3 pm.
Professor Rhodri’s most recent book, a follow-up to his highly praised book on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is Shakespeare’s Tragic Art(Princeton University Press 2024). The latter book first came to my attention through a rave review by Philip Womack in The Spectator (November 2024): “Why Shakespeare remains the great playwright: Rhodri Lewis’s book offers so many fresh insights and well-turned phrases that I had to buy a new notebook to fit them all in”. From Womack’s review:
Lewis’s Shakespeare is a living playwright growing and changing, grappling with ideas and shaping them to form a unique---and startlingly modern—vision. Gone are the stiff unities and rules of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and in their place come contingency and indeterminacy. The world is ruled not by divinely ordained laws of necessity and fate; something as haphazard as an undelivered letter can cause the deaths of two young lovers, as in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’
In Lear as well, as Professor Rhodri writes, at 38:
Cordelia’s slightly truculent rectitude at the start of ‘King Lear’ may or may not warrant retribution, but her death comes about because Edgar enjoys talking about himself and because Albany is happier listening to him than probing Edmund on the whereabouts of the king and his daughter. It could easily have been avoided.
So what does Shakespeare offer in his tragedies as the source(s) of human suffering and, in response, as wellsprings of comfort? As to the latter, we must find it on our own, for not the structure of religion nor the application of reason nor even, especially in Lear, the god or gods of Nature can provide a settled understanding of justice or right in this world or set rules or law to follow, at least according to Shakespeare. As to the former, id. at 38, Professor Rhodri writes:
. . . [A]lthough suffering is a universal of the human condition, its occurrences are invariably circumstantial. It always arises from a concatenation of accidents, contingencies, passions, misapprehensions, noble deeds and aspirations, and sheer bad timing.
The events portrayed in Shakespeare’s tragedies, are caused by human agency, not by Nature, not by God. By humans, Shakespeare is careful to show, who have no fixed identity, who alter and are altered by events. “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” (Lear) And unable to see or respond to the delusions that keep them from understanding what and why they are acting: “[T]he characters of King Lear not only do not know what they are doing or why they are doing it, but also seek to insulate themselves against any possibility or acknowledging that this is the case.” At 199. Their words are unmoored from their meaning.
The play is gut wrenching, or, rather, heart wrenching, as Tragedy, as a character in another play that was staged by Shakespeare’s acting company states in an Induction:
I must have passions that must move the soule,
Make the heart heave, and throb within the bosome,
Extorting tears out of the strictest eyes,
To racke a thought and straine it to his forme,
Untill I rap the sences from their course,
This is my office.
To what end for us the readers? To what end for us the audience? Perhaps to bring to us what Professor Rhodri calls “clarification” in our appreciation of ourselves and our world, one that contains within it “a deep circumspection, an epistemic humility about what can and can’t meaningfully be understood.” At 44. “Rack[ing] our sences from their course” moves us to an emotional plane to see, even with our evasions and delusions, what reason cannot disclose, and what Shakespeare shows asks us to be aware of “at the core of the human condition”: “contingency, flux, and uncertainty.” Id.
Perhaps we can look Lear in the eye after 60 years of living with uncertainty, facing events ruled by contingency, with a world as well as our personal histories in flux, and living with evasions of responsibility for human agency by those around us—and by us. Certainly some of our Casual Conversations have read into these themes. Professor Eggington’s book argues that there is nom present and as we try to grapple with it, the “present” as at once the past. So, too, Shakespeare would argue is our notion of self, changing with the progress of our history. And several of our scientific Casual Conversations, and discussion on our Class listserv, have invited us to explore our adoption of fallacies and the inevitable biases through which we view the world.
A personal note. I have seen Lear performed at Stratford CT with the Yiddish theater actor Morris Carnovsky, at The Shakespeare Theatre in D.C. with Patrick Page and with Stacy Keach, in Stratford ON with Colm Feore and with Brian Bedford, at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Theater with Stephen Paul Johnson, at CenterStage Baltimore, and at The Globe in London. Except for Brian Bedford’s Lear, which he co-directed as well as starred in, each of the other productions (and those are the ones I remember attending), were failures, failures resulting from the inability of the lead actor or director or both to grapple with the indeterminacy and horrors—mostly internal—of the play. From their fears at facing their own personal void, of nothingness, of the inevitable death, and of their loss of their authority and agency as men who live by their craft in the theater. Except for Bedford, I was offered no pity, no anguish, and my senses were left moored in their usual course.
Ah, but in the Festival Theatre in Stratford ON when I felt the emotion brought by Brian Bedford bringing the dead body of his daughter on stage, I understood inside me what a transforming experience in the theater Shakespeare offered. I was unmoored, and deeply grateful for it. “Ekstasis connotes the condition of being transported beyond oneself, of experiencing an exalted level of feeling that captures one’s conscious and elevates above rational thought.” At 47.
Come join us on this Monday, August 18, at 3 pm Eastern Time. Send me an email to confirm your attendance by this Saturday, August 16. My email address is arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com.
Arthur Fergenson
P.S. I was asked for a recommendation of a film version, and I don’t have one. I have seen only one Shakespeare play on film that I value,Chimes at Midnight (aka Falstaff). I would suggest that you read the play, especially the first act, which is where our guest focuses a great deal of his energies in his book. And, of course, read the last act. Shakespeare’s King Lear is a play after all, and notwithstanding Harold Bloom’s (bizarre) preference for Shakespeare as solely a poet, Shakespeare is best understood in his plays as a consummate artist of the dramatic form. You could also listen to the late Dartmouth Professor Peter Saccio’s Great Courses lectures on Lear, which are quite good. It was from him that I learned that the play has six false happy endings. If you become passionate about Lear, you could buy the two volume New Variorum edition of the play, which costs $300 new.