DIVISION

No ghosts haunt the play, no voices from the past, such as those that exert an immense influence in Hamlet; that play is obsessed with memory, but there is no memory in King Lear, except of vague injustices and neglect of the poor. Lear has no history in spite of his great age. We know nothing of how he came to the throne, of the events of his reign, even how long he has reigned, so that it seems he has been in power for ever. We know nothing of his queen, of her life or death, in striking contrast to the old play of King Leir, which begins with the obsequies of Leir's ‘deceased and dearest Queen’, and with lamentation that his daughters will lack ‘their mother's good advice’. We know nothing of how Lear came to marry late, as he must have done, and spawn three daughters, one of marriageable age at the beginning of the play, and so, by analogy with Juliet and Viola, in her teens. There is nothing to tell us how it came about that he was over sixty when Cordelia and perhaps his other daughters were born. It is as if Lear has ruled England for so long that all memory of his predecessors has been wiped out. Gloucester may say ‘We have seen the best of our time’, but we have no sense of what that ‘best’ was; the past is a blank, and the present is all that matters.