And who’s the fool who wears the crown?

Fearless – Pink Floyd, 1972 (Waters/Gilmour)

A legacy divided between two daughters, a third daughter disinherited. Manipulation and calculated flattery are rewarded while honesty and simple filial love is rejected. A kingdom divided against itself. An inheritance squandered.

Shakespeare’s Lear, aging king of a mythical pre-Roman Britain, seeks to ensure his kingdom’s stable and secure future while living out his remaining days in quiet and honourable retirement. But instead he plunges the nation into chaos and conflict. Lear’s notionally medieval values of a stratified society, with a code of honour, duty and community, are values implicitly shared by his disinherited daughter, Cordelia. But they are usurped by the Machiavellian individualism of Goneril, Regan and Edmund, the ruthless illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester. For Shakespeare, Edmund:

…. embodies something vital which a final synthesis must reaffirm. But he makes an absolute claim which Shakespeare will not support. It is right for man to feel, as Edmund does, that society exists for man, not man for society. It is not right to assert the kind of man Edmund would erect to this supremacy.

Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature – John F Danby (1949)

Back in 1990 I saw a production of King Lear at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. It featured Richard Briers as Lear, Emma Thompson as the Fool and Kenneth Branagh playing Edgar, as well as directing.

Apart from the stellar cast, the most memorable thing about this production for me was the stage set. The floor of the stage appeared to be painted with a map of Britain. It was only as the action of the play progressed and the actors moved about the stage that we, the audience, came to realise that the map was not painted, but had been constructed from coloured sand. Presumably, it was freshly put together for each performance.

As the actors strode, shuffled, paced, crawled and ran about the stage, the sand was gradually disturbed; at first becoming smudged and later completely churned up. The visual metaphor was clear: Lear and his daughters were unwittingly destroying the kingdom by their actions. They were, quite literally, breaking it up. The parallels with 2020 are, I fear, equally clear.