William Shakespeare
Re Lear

We will hardly forget this period. Forced confinement, lines at the supermarket, meters of distance, war bulletins, masks, gloves, and bewildered looks.

A long, slow, creeping melody of death that hisses in the interstices of the everyday. A main theme with its many variations: my partner armed with hand sanitizer, video calls to my parents, the emails suspending theater workshops "until further notice".

Death. Death that I try to counteract with my personal resistance made of books, records, films, games with the cat, and meals with a smile on my face. Death. Death to which I oppose life.

Shakespeare's theater has many virtues, and among them, two particularly wander in my little head these days of forced bunker: variations and counterpoints.

The mastery with which, within a play, the Bard reiterated the breath of a theme - central and otherwise - through its variations and the skill with which he sewed it on the fabric of narration using the thread of precise counterpoints.

Lear is not simply a king but represents the motif of the man of power heading toward irreversible ruin, an occlusion - primarily moral - of all faculties. While he yields to the flattery of two of his daughters, Goneril and Regan, dividing and entrusting the kingdom to them, in an excess of ridiculous senile vanity he disinherits and banishes Cordelia, his youngest daughter, who refused to flatter him: "the barbarian Scythian, or he who makes a meal of his own kin to satisfy his appetite, will be good neighbors to my heart, and will find pity and aid equal to you, who once were my daughter".

In the Tragedy, Lear's music is echoed and varied by the Earl of Gloucester, who is also unable to discern the true nature of his two sons and makes the mistake of trusting the wrong offspring, the vile Edmund (a close relative of Iago in the shores of "Othello") to the detriment of the noble Edgar.

The score of Lear and Gloucester is that of elderly men who are no longer capable of doing the "right thing", octogenarians in body and spirit who gallop along a path paved with childish whims and blindness (not coincidentally the first will sink into madness and the second will have his eyes gouged out).

The counterpoint to their motif is represented by the Earl of Kent. Like them, old and powerful, but of an entirely different nature. Sharp, with a steel-like resilience and loyal despite the injustices suffered, he does not hesitate to speak clearly to the king, defending Cordelia: "what would you pretend to do, old man? Do you believe that duty can be afraid to speak, when power bows to flattery? Honor is bound to honesty, when majesty humbles itself to madness".

And Cordelia indeed brings with her the other macro-theme of the Tragedy: iron devotion dressed with sweet firmness - "I am sure, my love weighs more than my tongue [...] I love Your Majesty as far as my duty extends; no more no less" -, youth cloaked in purity, delicacy of manners combined with wisdom of words: "why do my sisters have husbands, if they say all their love is for Your Majesty?".

This music is echoed and varied by both the brave Edgar (who shares with Cordelia a fate of unjust exile and later redemption in the eyes of the parent), and the Duke of Albany who unhesitatingly repudiates Goneril, his wife, guilty of betrayal and accompanying cruelties: "wisdom and virtue appear vile to the base; filth enjoys only itself".

The counterpoints? The bloody and merciless youth. The duplicity and despicable conduct of Edmund; the violence and rigidity of the Duke of Cornwall; the hypocrisy and lust of Goneril and Regan, Cordelia's elder sisters and almost the littler sisters, more trivial and materialistic, of that Lady Macbeth who managed despite everything to seduce the reader with the dark and devilish allure of her perverse femininity.

Naturally, as in all major Works by Shakespeare, what I am attempting to offer is just one of the possible ways to interpret "King Lear" and this play of echoes, reprises, variations, and counterpoints certainly does not exhaust itself in the most conspicuous elements.

Thus, for example, if the places where the worst iniquities are committed are the lavish rooms of Lear's castle, the variation is represented by those committed in the opulent manor of Gloucester and the counterpoints are the solidarity and care for others shown in humble country dwellings; if the blind servility of courtiers is represented by Oswald (Goneril's steward), the variation is represented by the staff of the Duke of Cornwall and the counterpoints are the attitude and words of the palace fool who, without any reverence, tries to reason with Lear: "since the day you made your daughters your mothers, you gave them the rod and lowered your pants".

Above all watches the inscrutable path of Destiny, the whimsical course of Fortune, the impassive eye of Fate that rewards and punishes humans indiscriminately who, in Gloucester's words, are nothing more than "what flies are to wanton boys: a game".

To these monotonous, stagnant, and tiring days, to this sense of impotence, to all the thoughts rummaging in the refuse of fear. To all this I oppose possibility. To death, I oppose Shakespeare. To death, I oppose life.