If Democrats really wanted to understand the president
One Gregg Opelka in the Wall Street Journal:
If Democrats really wanted to understand the President, they would read Shakespeare’s King Lear. All the ageing monarch wants is to be loved and appreciated by his three daughters. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child,” he laments about his eldest, Goneril.
Trump is Lear, and the country is the king’s daughters. What wounded the king more than anything was filial ingratitude.
Er…no. That’s not Shakespeare’s play. “All the aging monarch wants” is everything – to quit being a king but to go right on getting all the perks and all the groveling, to get everyone to declare infinite love for him, to be surrounded with flatterers who never tell him the truth about himself, to have his dinner the instant he wants it, to throw his only honest and genuinely loving daughter to the wolves and his only honest and genuinely loving courtier right after her, to treat everyone else like slaves while he expects to be treated like a god. Trump is very like him in the pre-storm half of the play, but unlike Trump, Lear finally learns better.
Lear is most definitely not the deeply-wronged noble hero of the play: he’s the bad king and bad father and bad man who has to be stripped of everything before he can see himself clearly.
After a series of seemingly never-ending assaults on his dignity, Lear painfully observes out on the rainy heath: “I am a man / More sinn’d against than sinning.” It isn’t difficult to envision Trump saying the same.
Indeed it’s not, and he’d be just as wrong. Lear has sinned against others far more than even Goneril and Regan have sinned against him. Trump of course never ever admits he’s wrong about anything, even a simple fact.
Even adamant supporters of the President aren’t blind to his annoying character flaws — the endless self-aggrandisement, the bravado, the hyperbole, the unpresidential disregard for language. Trump’s brashness invites his mistreatment to some extent.
Shakespeare’s Lear was full of himself too. And like the king, Trump has been subjected to a daily barrage of indignities, distortions and outright falsehoods, which render him a folk hero to his followers.
The king is not “subjected to a daily barrage of indignities, distortions and outright falsehoods.” He has his retinue steadily reduced over the course of two short scenes, and his two older daughters speak dismissively to him. That’s all. It’s bad enough but it’s less than what he’s done. The more sinned against than sinning in this play are Cordelia and Kent, not Lear.
In the Trump-Lear story, Trump’s champions resemble the faithful Kent, who called the monarch “every inch a king”.
Er, no. It’s Lear who says that, with deep irony, when he’s wandering the heath after going mad.
Gregg Opelka might consider actually reading the play.
Why do we want to understand him? I thought everyone did… Supposedly he communicates in a down to earth way.
The only line from King Lear that I would apply to Trump is, “Out, vile jelly!” Metaphorically, of course.
Oh there are lots. “He hath ever but slenderly known himself” for a start.
Oh, that is good.
For what this is worth, the link goes to The Australian, a pay to see site.
Huh, the piece was free to read when I clicked on it, so I used that one, because WSJ isn’t.
Anyway you can see what a crap piece it is from the excerpts, so…
The biggest problem with this analogy is that there is no Cordelia, no one in the inner circle willing not to flatter him.
What a Maroon, there were some, but they have all been cleared away. Most of them were sycophants, too, of course. They just weren’t willing to go as far. So not exactly Cordelia.
What about Giuliani or Lindsay Graham as Kent?
I would certainly agree that Lear is a monster, but it is interesting that it is those who are not willing to flatter him who stand by him; I do not think they would if they if he was all monster – they find in him things worthy of respect.. But it is Lear who releases the other monsters by the self-aggrandizing decision to split a unified kingdom into three (and then two), a sure recipe for civil war.
Trump would never have put up with the Fool telling him home truths, as Lear did.
“Thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gavest thy golden one away.”
The “bald” (or a more appropriate physical insult) would make him gibber with fury.
He’s more like Little Finger, who’d do anything to be the top dog, even if it’s of a pile of ashes. And he’s not even a tenth that competent as Little Finger.
Tim @ 8 – yes that has always nagged at me – Cordelia’s and Kent’s absolute loyalty when we see absolutely nothing that deserves it.But the play wouldn’t work the same way if we did see it, so I just get the ol’ willing suspension of disbelief out of the drawer.
iknklast,
But to be a Cordelia they’d have to be close to him personally (I hesitate to say “a loved one” because I don’t think Trump is capable of loving anyone besides himself; then again, neither was Lear). Maybe Tiffany could play the role, but I get the impression that she doesn’t care.
Well, in the terms of the play, Lear was capable of loving anyone besides himself. In expanding on her “Nothing” Cordelia says: “You have begot me, bred me, loved me.” We doubt the reality of a love that can be negated in an instant for such a bad reason, but still, we have to take into account that Cordelia puts that on the record. The final scene does tend to confirm it.
Trump, on the other hand…
Fair point, and getting back to your @11, it seems clear that in his backstory there was a time when Lear was a good ruler and loving father but in his old age he’s let his vanity take over.
Whereas Trump has always been Trump.
Wait, wasn’t it Cordelia’s unwillingness to flatter that drew Lear’s complaint about ‘thanklessness?’
Yes. I skipped over that one to get to the next bit. The guy really ought to read or see or listen to the play.
I’ve read an analysis of Lear as someone with dementia – delusions, change of personality, fits of anger.
KBPlayer, he seems at least at times to grasp that himself, such as shouting “I will not be mad!”. Which, in this day and age of identity meaning everything, would, of course, mean that he is not mad. But in Shakespeare’s time, it would not have made any difference. If he was mad, he would be mad regardless of his preference.
iknklast, in this day and age of outrage, Lear’s character couldn’t even say that line on stage. Ableist and brain-shaming the cognitively-diverse community. Gadzooks!
You know, AoS, you may be on to something. The most recent production we saw of that either didn’t have the line at all, or minimized it so much that we didn’t notice it. God, I hope we haven’t gone that far down the rabbit hole.
The trouble is, I feel, that Coleridge’s dictum that in watching a play we adopt ‘that willing suspension of disbelief which constitutes poetic faith’ doesn’t hold up – the question of belief or disbelief does not arise where the arts are concerned, it seems to me. Since there is no possibility (unless perhaps we are children seeing a play for the first time) of believing that what we are seeing on stage is real, the question of disbelief cannot arise. And, forgive me, when it is brought in to accommodate some particular part of a play, and does not apply to the rest, it seems to suggest that Shakespeare is merely manipulating things at certain points, when I don’t think he is. The question of implausibility may certainly arise in the case of a bad and overly naturalistic play that pretends to be presenting a slice of life and no more (that is to say, not something by Chekhov, for example), but that is another matter. This idea of belief or disbelief could only arise in the context of a religion which insists upon willed belief – I have never come across anything remotely like the concept in connexion with the Japanese arts, and I have lived in Japan for 46 years now (I remember in this connexion the account of the Western anthropologist who was taking creation myths, etc, down from a member of some South American tribe, and at the end of it the Indian turned to him and said, ‘I suppose you think we believe all this.’)
We don’t know what kind of king Lear has been before the beginning of the play (though Lear later does say, among other things, that he has taken too little care with respect to the poor), but I should suggest that, despite his faults, he has been generally a good one. I think it is very telling that Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, and the somewhat compromised Gloucester, not to mention the Fool, see in him someone they can respect and love – and in the cases of Cordelia, Kent and the Fool, they stand up to him. He has held the kingdom together – but now, in his dotage overtaken by a kind of madness (as Leontes is in ‘The Winter’s Tale’), he decides to split the kingdom into three, and then two, parts which is a sure recipe for civil war – it is not very far into the play at all that we hear that Cornwall and Albany are already preparing themselves for war.
Goneril & Regan. (Elizabeth I and James I, by the way, had rotten childhoods, and yet were certainly not bad monarchs.) I should say that Shakespeare goes out of his way to show that Goneril and Regan have a case (though I wonder whether we should, as Peter Brook did in his production, take Goneril’s view of the behaviour of Lear’s knights, who include Edgar, as against Lear’s insistence that that they ‘are men of choice and rarest parts,/ That all particulars of duty know,/ And in the most exact regard support/ The worship of their name.’) They do have a strong case at the outset – and Lear behaves appallingly (his cursing of Goneril is absolutely shocking) – but there comes a point when we can no longer sympathise with them, and I would say it comes with the thrusting out of Lear into the storm, followed by the blinding of Gloucester. We know them now for what they are (to paraphrase Cordelia).
For the kind of irresponsible cynicism we see in politics in Britain and the US now, the Johnsons, Cummings’s and Trumps, I think we should look rather to the character of Edmund.
Apologies for the length of this!
Not at all! It’s an interesting subject.
I think the willing suspension of disbelief – at least as a general term lifted from Coleridge, whether or not it’s really what Coleridge was arguing – has to do not with the fictionality of the entire play (or novel etc) but with internal consistency. It’s always seemed to me that it’s a massive inconsistency that the good people are so passionately loyal to Lear when what we see is a cruel selfish bullying narcissist…and that that simply is the story and we have to accept that part for the rest of it to work on us. It didn’t work on me when I first read it as an English major in college (which is part of why I changed my major to history), but it did (and does) later.
You’re kind of saying the same thing yourself. “I should suggest that, despite his faults, he has been generally a good one. I think it is very telling that Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, and the somewhat compromised Gloucester, not to mention the Fool, see in him someone they can respect and love” – exactly so. They do, but we can’t see for ourselves why they do, so we just have to accept that they do. Their loyalty colors how we see his escalating losses and misery; without it we would just think he had it coming.
Shakespeare had two grown daughters by the time he wrote Lear; their brother died young (age 11 I think). He writes a LOT about fathers and daughters, and also a lot about wronged women; both are most unusual for that time, when the “she’s a whore” theme was much more popular. I suspect the Lear-Cordelia theme haunted him. He needed the alienation to be absolute for the reconciliation to be so gripping…and I guess he also needed to make the daddy the god damn fool who threw his daughter away. That’s not an argument for anything, just kind of interesting background (I think).