The Year of Lear

In 2007, a small theater company in Northern Virginia attracted national attention with a Macbeth staged entirely in the nude. The Washington Post assigned me to review the production. The experience was less of an ordeal than I had anticipated—the show’s lighting was muted, and the actors sported some tactfully applied body paint—but the performances weren’t revelatory, and the overall project seemed misguided. As far as I could see, the nakedness conceit was not anchored in any aspect of the Scottish play.

It occurred to me at the time, however, that a case could be made for an in-the-buff production of Shakespeare’s King Lear. After all, that tragedy’s eponymous royal rips his clothing off in the middle of a storm, while pitying other “poor naked wretches” who are similarly weather-beset. King Lear is partly about loss, exposure, and vulnerability.

Support for a full-monty Lear might even be garnered from Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro’s fascinating new book, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. Shapiro writes that “the idea of nothingness and negation is philosophically central” to King Lear, which Shakespeare based on King Leir, a clumsy non-tragedy by a now-anonymous scribbler. While reimagining this piece of tripe, which had featured the word “nothing” as part of a dirty joke, Shakespeare turned the idea of zilch into a haunting theme. The words “never” and “nothing” turn up more than thirty times in King Lear, starting with Cordelia’s impolitic admission that she can add diddly-squat to her sisters’ specious flattery of their

Article source: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/year-lear