Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse the 2018 BBC Two’s King Lear as a commentary on our modern inability to deal with death. Although the Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to confront death on a scale unprecedented in our lifetime, our conception of death as a cultural phenomenon still differs radically from that of our predecessors. Contemporary society tends to perceive it as a private and invisible affair rather than as a visible and ubiquitous occurrence, as it was in the early modern period. In The Hour of Our Death (1981), Philippe Ariès defined modern Western attitudes towards death as being characterized by a deep sense of shame. People cannot reconcile the inevitability of death with progress, and so they have learned to hide it and to see it as something inherently negative, unsanitary and shameful. This conception of death is at the very core of the BBC Two’s King Lear (2018), which sets William Shakespeare’s play in a modern setting. In King Lear (2018), the protagonist’s madness is almost explicitly coded as some form of dementia. Lear spouts abuse at his daughters, plants inappropriate kisses on others, and his inability to recognize Kent is framed as a symptom of some sort of degenerative disorder.

In this paper, I will contrast Lear’s original status as the outdated patriarch, who must contend with the passive role assigned to the old, with the modern Lear’s obvious echoes of the Western society’s inability to deal with those who are old and dying. As Kellehear argues in A Social History of Dying (2007), reaching very old age was always associated with a specific set of problems, but the increasing number of old people in modern Western societies has shaped the responses to the issue. Many now end up institutionalized, isolated and stripped from the opportunity to have a “good death.” This, too, has added to the idea of death as something shameful. In light of this, I argue that King Lear (2018) contains echoes of the way Western society deals with its dying elderly population, and highlights a distinctively twenty-first-century crisis.