Watching King Lear in 2026

I watched Shakespeare’s brutal play in this lovely new theater of Hudson Valley Shakespeare.

HOBOKEN, JULY 3, 2026.  Before the play begins, I’m in a nostalgic, pleasantly melancholic mood. Then that opening scene whacks me across the face, as if to say, Wake up, you old fool, pay attention!

I saw King Lear last Sunday in Garrison, New York, a hamlet on the Hudson River. I lived in Garrison with my wife, son and daughter from 1990 until 2009, when my marriage ended. Hence the nostalgia.

I saw lots of plays produced by Hudson Valley Shakespeare when I lived in Garrison. One of my favorites was Taming of the Shrew, in which Kurt Rhoads and Nance Williamson, a real-life couple, played the leads.

I bought tickets for Lear in part to see Kurt and Nance, whom I once knew but haven’t seen since my wife and I split up. Kurt plays Lear and Nance the Fool in the new production. I also wanted to check out Hudson Valley Shakespeare’s brand-new, open-air theater.

The theater, which overlooks the Hudson River, is magnificent. So are Kurt and Nance. The performances, setting, play—everything works almost too well. I’m left contemplating the tragic flaws not of one ancient, imaginary king but of humankind.

There are overlaps between Lear and Death of a Salesman, which I saw just three days earlier (and review here). In both plays, an old man rages against the indignities of old age. loses his grip on reality, lashes out at those who love him.

But Salesman focuses on working-class folk, Lear on noblemen and noblewomen. Lear’s characters possess power and want more, more, more. They wheel and deal, backstab, double-cross each other.

Lear thus grounds riffs on love, ambition, morality, mortality and other deep features of the human condition in nitty-gritty power politics. That’s one reason this 400-year-old play feels so excruciatingly modern.

Another reason is that Shakespeare, the master of words, shows how easily words can be weaponized. In that opening scene, Lear falls for the flattery of his cold-hearted daughters Goneril and Regan.

Later, Edmund, the son of the Earl of Gloucester, persuades his father that he, Edmund, is good, and his brother, Edgar, bad. In fact, the opposite is true, but gullible Gloucester banishes the good son.

In Lear, lying is rewarded, honesty punished. Lear disowns Cordelia, who truly loves him, because she’s doesn’t kiss his ass with sufficient ardor. He banishes the Earl of Kent, his most faithful advisor, when he sticks up for Cordelia.

To survive in a world dominated by ruthless liars, good guys must become liars too. Edgar and the Earl of Kent both assume false identities. Edgar becomes a homeless wacko, Mad Tom, and Kent a wise-cracking peasant, Caius.

Truth-telling is perilous, especially if what you say upsets those in power. The play’s chief truth-tellers are the Fool, Mad Tom (Edgar pretending to be mad), Caius (the Earl of Kent’s alter ego) and Lear himself after he goes mad. They conceal truth in puns, jokes, paradoxes, koan-like riddles.

Lear reinforces my conviction that artists make the best philosophers, because they know truth can never be entirely captured, and reason is overrated. Instead of asserting, This is how things are, or This is how things should be, Woolf, Tolstoy and Shakespeare say: Imagine this. Art is the lie that tells the truth.

In Lear, Shakespeare presents a stripped-down version of right and wrong. We know who is good and bad because characters speak directly to us, revealing their private thoughts. Good guys are motivated by love, bad guys by self-interest. Cordelia and the Earl of Kent love Lear, they’re loyal to him, even after he treats them badly.

Regan, Goneril and Edmund, the bad guys, are motivated by naked ambition, lust for power. They love no one, are loyal to no one. They take pleasure in deceiving and hurting others. They disdain love and compassion as weakness.

Here in the real world, distinguishing the good from the bad can be hard. We can’t be sure what’s going on in each other’s heads, or even our own. We gaslight each other and ourselves. Most of us are motivated by both love and self-interest, which are entangled. In the real world, love for king, kin and country can make us mass-murderers.

Lear leaves us facing big questions: Will the good in us prevail over the bad? Will reason help us overcome our tendency to deceive others and ourselves, and to be deceived? Are we going to be okay?

Until recently, my answer would have been yes. I had faith that things are gradually, haltingly, getting better, morally as well as materially. Good guys won World War II and the Cold War, right? The world is becoming more peaceful, prosperous, just. But my faith in progress has been wobbling.

Lear doesn’t exactly restore my faith. The ending is brutal. So brutal that, for much of the 18th and 19th centuries, producers of King Lear tacked on a happy ending, in which Cordelia, the good daughter, survives.

Shakespeare does not show the inevitable triumph of good over evil. For most of Lear, bad guys out-maneuver good guys. Bad guys slaughter and torture good guys before turning on each other.

The only decent person who survives the final bloodbath is Edgar, who kills his nasty brother Edmund in a sword fight. Edgar’s victory feels like luck, like something that could easily have gone the other way.

Edgar wraps things up with a half-hearted plea for truth-telling: We should “speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” Good luck with that in this age of AI-enabled bullshit. Edgar seems to be in shock. He delivers this coda facing us, the audience.

Beyond Edgar, on a slope outside the theater, stand the dead: Lear, his daughters, the Fool, Gloucester, Edmund, others. These ghosts face away from us, toward the hazily distant Hudson River and setting sun. It’s a lovely image, but oh, how it makes my heart break. Is this our best hope for peace? The peace of death?

Other questions come to mind: Can great art redeem us? Save us from ourselves? Or does a masterpiece like Lear just flatter us, make us feel a little better about ourselves before we resume skimming The New Yorker and checking our 401K?

That’s what I’m wondering on the eve of my country’s 250th birthday.

Further Reading:

For more riffs on literature, see Proust Was Goofing on Us, Pynchon, Thanatoids and the Ferris Wheel of Life, Is “The Waste Land” Accurate?, What’s Poetry’s Point? A Riff on “Paterson”, Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag and Free Will, Surfing Woolf’s “The Waves”, Woolf Versus Buddha, I Read Gravity’s Rainbow So You Don’t Have To, Is David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” Really, Like, Great?, My Bloomsday Tribute to James Joyce, Greatest Mind-Scientist Ever, Henry James, The Ambassadors and the Dithering Hero, The Golden Bowl and the Combinatorial Explosion of Theories of Mind, Free Will, War and the Tolstoy Paradox, Moby Dick and Hawking’s “Ultimate Theory”, Jack London, Liberal Arts and the Dream of Total Knowledge.