King Lear--Act Three

This act goes well beyond blogging material. We've encountered this a few times before, but I think that in this act we have the most sublime piece of writing in the English tradition. With Hamlet, I could say some things because so many people before me haven't been bothered about adding their crap onto Hamlet, whose countrymen are now so out of favor here in Chicago. With Lear, it is different.

And so I turn to peripheral matters. Matters peripheral to the play. It's come with me a few times down to Hyde Park, where I now work at the Unitarian Universalist seminary, Meadville Lombard Theological School. To get there, I walk past this great bookstore on 57th street, I think it's called 57th street books or something. At street level they have these two display windows, both done out now for Halloween. So it full of books on vampires and zombies. Today there was a new addition not only to the window but to our pop culture's obsession with monsters: werewolves. This bothers me a little, because I was pretending to plan a book about a werewolf hunter. I think that it would have done quite well.

These gothic themes come and go in our culture. Right now, you have two possibly distinct movements. Young people are obsessed with vampires because of Ms. Meyer's not very good books (or, books not aimed to please me). I've heard it suggested that these are written to make teen sex seem dangerous again. I think that most of us already knew that teen sex was awkward and dangerous (pregnancy, parents coming home) and complicated. Most of us probably think not that we wouldn't do it again, but that we would change every single facet of how we did it. That's an interesting idea to me, though: the function these gothic stories are playing in our culture at large. I think of Anne Rice pumping out all those vampire books as AIDS was getting going and we were all becoming aware of the danger in blood and sex.

The other trend is the hipsters' love for zombie stuff. I think this one is pretty clear. They're scared of growing up. Especially, they're scared of growing up into the suit-wearing "zombies" they see out there. Shakespeare vs. Zombies regrets its association with this movement. It was done in ignorance. Kind of like how I have four pages of a story that turned out to be a crappier verson of HBO's Bored to Death. When is it first suggested to me that these things are cool? And then when do I realize that I've aligned myself with something much bigger? Kind of like Freedom. You start thinking about freedom, how great it is and everything--and then before you know it you're propping up banana republics in South America and invading countries in the Middle East. And then, mysteriously, winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

Act three truly is as good as English gets. Lear is crazy and in the woods and eventually a cave. He's hanging out with Kent, who is there in disguise, and Edgar, who is disguised as a mad man but keeps breaking character to talk about how sad he is about Lear, and the Fool, who a few moments previously steps right the hell out of the play and tells us, directly, that he lives several hundred years before Merlin. It's wild. It's great. It's taken me way too long to blog about it.

These things are intimidating. And then it's been a week. And then two.

Hmmm,what do I have to say about King Lear that I think is interesting enough to put on the internet, where anyone could potentially see it and at least two family members and friends certainly will? I guess I remain old-fashioned that this thought even crosses my mind. I should be doing this in Twitter or something. But that name reminds me too much of certain lines the Fool coos into Lear's boiling brain. Lear gave me a mantra a few years ago: Not that way, that way madness lies.