Aging with Lear

By my best estimate, I’ve read King Lear six or seven times. I read it for the first time in my early twenties, before I married and had children, and my assessment of Lear at that time in my life was that of a young man who hadn’t been forced to look hard at himself and his weaknesses. I didn’t see what Lear and I had in common, though with my latest reading, certain uncomfortable aspects of Lear’s personality resonated in a way that they didn’t twenty-plus years ago.

In my first reading of King Lear, I took Lear’s defense of himself at face value. Lear exclaims in the middle of the play, “I am a man / more sinned against than sinning.” (Act 3, Scene 2, lines 59-60). By this point in the play, Lear’s two older daughters, despite their proclamations of love in the first scene, have shown their teeth, and have driven their father and his handful of followers out into a storm with no shelter. Lear’s famous line from the middle of the storm sounds defensive. He’s willing to admit on some level that he has sinned, but his failings are not as great as the failings of others.

I remember discussing this play in a book group, and I felt that Lear’s defense was valid. He wasn’t as guilty as others. His rash behavior in the first scene of the play, when he gave away his kingdom to his two elder daughters, and banished the two people who were the most devoted to him, Cordelia and Kent, was not as bad as the subsequent behavior of Goneril and Regan. My assessment of Lear meshed with his own in the middle of the play. Of course, at that point in the play, Lear is not thinking clearly. The treatment he has received from his two older daughters, and his exposure to the elements in the storm, are causing him to lose touch with reality. His very next line after proclaiming his innocence, or rather, the greater guilt of others, is “My wits begin to turn.” (Act 3, Scene 2, line 67).

However, my assessment of Lear’s culpability has shifted in the years since I read the play for the first time. In the intervening years, I’ve married and had children, and have struggled along with a child who has his own demons to battle. As I look back at the conflicts my son and I have had, I can see too much of the unrepentant Lear in my early years. Yes, I could definitely say, along with Lear, that I was a man more sinned against than sinning, but that doesn’t excuse my own sins. Like Lear, I can look back at my own anger and demands upon my children, and see a need for forgiveness. Lear himself grows through his experience, and recognizes the need for repentance at the end of the play. In the final scene of the play, when Lear and Cordelia are being taken away to prison, Lear says to her,

When thou dost ask me blessing I’ll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness. (Act 5, Scene 3, lines 10-11)

Somehow I missed this development in Lear during all of my previous readings, when I was too willing to join Lear in weighing my sins against the sins of others. The sins of others don’t excuse our own.