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I heard recently that King Lear was written while Shakespeare was in quarantine.
So deadly was the plague sweeping across England in late July 1606, that Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, had to lock the playhouse doors.

Just two years earlier, more than 30,000 Londoners had died in an outbreak. Plague’s symptoms included fever, a racing pulse and breathlessness, thirst and stumbling, “great dolor of head with heaviness, solicitude, and sadness in mind.” In the end, speech would become difficult, and “victims would rave or suffer delirium before succumbing to heart failure.” It was a terrible way to die. The most vulnerable ranged from age 10 to 35.

Thus Shakespeare spent much of 1606 in quarantine — and here we are today with a timeless masterpiece as a result!  Some say King Lear is the finest drama ever written. According to Antoni Cimolino, Stratford Festival’s Artistic Director, “The play seems almost prophetic.” One critic says, “Lear portrays redemption through suffering… It invokes the promise that the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” Another admirer: “What a blessing that there was no Netflix to distract him!”

Of course, not everyone loves King Lear — especially among those who overdosed on the play in Secondary School. Or those who hate that most unhappy ending, where so much pain seems to follow one bad choice. Indeed, cruel fate seems to have triumphed in this play.  With all the grim wages of stupidity, there seems little room for grace. You might almost feel that Covid1606 pushed the Bard over the edge of gloom and doom!

And oh, what an impetuous and rash decision it was!  The King decides to disburse his possessions — large chunks of England, in fact — to his three daughters, so he can have fewer cares in his waning years. Wishful thinking indeed!
“And ’tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age;
Conferring them on younger strengths, while we
Unburthen’d crawl toward death.”

Whatever possessed the man to do such a thing? Was it some kind of vanity which needed affirmation from his grateful daughters? Did a wave of largesse come over him, as to King Herod promising “half my kingdom?” Was it, more simply, that ”there’s no fool like an old fool?” Whatever, this was a dumbfounding error of judgment — and the piper would have to be paid.

The king’s second mistake was telling his daughters that their inheritance would be based on their professions of love for him. And then believing their professions! Of course, the daughters get quite carried away with their vows of undying love:  “Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter; Dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty; Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare….” The old king’s heart is so warmed that he lays hold of the map and marks off huge chunks of his kingdom for his eldest daughters, Goneril and Regan. The only exception is Cordelia, his youngest daughter, who truly loves him, but refuses to play this game. The king is so badly askew by this point the he writes Cordelia off in a towering rage for her reticence! If she can’t be glowing in her confession of love, then let her starve! And no matter how his true friends try to calm him down, Lear is intractable: “Come not between the Dragon and his wrath!”

But this is a toothless old dragon, to be sure. His eldest daughters will throw him out, along with his retinue of soldiers. He ends up a castaway, unclothed and unhinged, wandering destitute on the heaths of England like a lost Nebuchadnezzar. As for a happy ending, this tragedy does not deal in such. By the end of the story, most everyone the reader cares about is dead.

But there is much more at work in King Lear than the tragic consequences of one bad decision. Yes, it is like the other tragedies of Shakespeare in dramatising the fall of a hero who gives in to an evil passion and is destroyed by it. Yet, this alone misses the larger point of the work. As eminent critic Russell Fraser puts it, “In fact the declining action, which is the dogging of the hero to death, is complemented by a rising action, which is the hero’s regeneration. As the tragic action moves down toward darkness, the more hopeful action that lives within it begins to emerge. The suspense the play develops comes from the ascending action, which is not material but spiritual. Battles and thrones count for little. What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?”

Evidence of regeneration is seen when the destitute King, caught ragged and wasted in a furious storm, allows his poor shivering companion to enter a hovel before him: “In boy, go first.” Here is where Lear expresses something quite new for him: compassion. As Fraser says, “This is another kind of reversal. Here is where the real hinge of the play takes place. These words do not signal the decay, but the metamorphosis of the King.

As a sign of his transformation, the King raises a great cry on behalf of the world’s poor — which includes his own complicity in their plight!  It is a new man who breaks out with this apotheosis:
“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you
From seasons such as these? O I have ta’en
Too little care of this.”

So it seems that for our viral world of Covid19, 2020, King Lear carries a most hopeful message. The hard road of suffering can actually lead to regeneration. All things can “work together for good” — including our most egregious mistakes. Or again, even the worst of times become a “light affliction” when the “inner man is renewed day by day.”

But picture this! Behind the scenes, there is the great figure of Shakespeare himself, working away under quarantine. By producing a timeless masterpiece, he stands as a beacon, an enduring reminder to us all: even though plagues and hardships may come nigh your dwelling, you can still be productive.

Indeed, you can be highly inspired, even “anointed with fresh oil,” right where you are.