King Lear is one of the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays, but also one of his most nonsensical. The closest I’ve seen to a successful Lear starred John Lithgow outdoors at Shakespeare in the Park in New York City, where Lear’s final tempest-tossed scene took place in an actual deluge, Lear’s tears mingling with the rain like the end of Blade Runner. Its script poses so many problems most companies resort to melodrama: eye-gouging, full-frontal wandering in the wilderness, and many failed attempts to emulate a storm. In fact, Lear has always been my least favorite of Shakespeare’s plays. Sheltering in place with just a handful of books, he turned again and again to the same source materials–stories that his contemporaries would have been deeply familiar with, but which are largely unknown by audiences today. Even less known is the effect that the quarantine had on the bard’s writing of the play. According to The Guardian there were many plague years while Shakespeare was writing his plays, and historian James Shapiro points out that Lear was first acted in private for King James I in the middle of a plague outbreak in 1606 that closed London’s theatres. But the real story may be more complicated. Legend has it that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while in quarantine from the plague. Tana Wojczuk is the author of Lady Romeo: The Radical and Revolutionary Life of Charlotte Cushman, America’s First Celebrity, out now on Avid Reader Press.
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