Shakespeare's Memento Mori

     Every end of summer we witness the reluctant return. You can see them now on these mornings in late August, “whining . . . with . . . satchel/  And shining morning face, creeping like snail/  Unwillingly to school.”  We can console ourselves by remembering that at least these children are learning misery, which will stand them in good stead for the “[l]ast scene of all, / . . . second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”  The foregoing quotations are from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Jaques' famous “The Seven Ages of Man” account of our predictable tenure on this earth.           Shakespeare has us coming and going.  And our exit is the occasion for one of his masterpieces, regarded by many as his greatest tragic play.  Lear, of course.  And here, a short essay I wrote charting the path the play lays out for us on our "long fools-errand to the grave."

Lear At The Dinner Table

by Michael Casey

          Our children remember what we forget we've said, and they forget what we want them to  remember.

          In family conversations during meals when my children were young, I apparently developed a practice that I paid little attention to--quoting passages from literary works that seemed apt to our comments and discussions.  One that always served me well was Lear's "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is/ To have a thankless child."  Even though I referenced it humorously, it apparently had a sticking (if not stinging) quality in the ear of my older daughter, Michele.  Years later when she was in her freshman year at Harvard, and had the opportunity to be the assistant director and dramaturge for a campus production of King Lear, she bedeviled the lead actor for repeated iterations of the "sharper than a serpent's tooth" passage until she could hear what she called her father's "withering tone."

          My younger daughter, Katie, had little interest in the dinner table's literary leavings.  "Hey Dad,  today in English, I learned that 'My heart is cleft in twain,' is in Hamlet.  I thought that was just something you liked to say."  Katie is a musician and it is her voice and her flute that I hear in the music of others, such as Tusanamuro in Ran.

          Both these daughters are at my heart's core, but they will be legatees of no land and certainly no kingdom.  While I know of no father who would not want to hear words of praise and love, I know of none who would assign such expression as a declamation exercise.  None but Lear.  I don't know whether his courage is awesome or awful. 

          When Lear himself speaks the "serpent's tooth" lines, he is beginning to feel the full force of his divestature. His expectation of filial devotion mocked, his own foolishness in bloom, he richochets between daughters who have deserted him.  There is something in Lear that fails to recognize or anticipate the necessary separating self interests of those whose selves he helped to create.  Because he is bringing his "darker purpose" (I, i, 38) into light; i.e., "to shake all cares and business from our age,/ Conferring them on younger strengths, while we/ Unburthened crawl toward death" (I, i, 41-43) he thinks his kingdom division will preclude "future strife" (I, i, 46).  Of course it does not.  The strife, intensified and internalized, sears his sanity and his soul.

          Of all the illusions that Lear is prey to, perhaps the most ruinous--and the one we are all vulnerable to--is that blood bonds will bind our children's choices.  In the play, it is not Lear alone who misreads progeny and sibling.  Gloucester invites destruction from his "natural" son, and Edgar allows Edmund to broadside him into ditch and hovel.  They receive the worst from those of whom they expect the best.  Why is it thus?  As Lear asks, "Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?" (III, iii, 76-77).

          It may be that there is a commonality in the nature of tragedy, family and aging.  Bound by suffering, lineage and mortality, we all seek the links that will preserve our presence and expand our pleasure in community.  But neither Lear's rage nor the Machiavel's plots can eclipse the stark truth that Tolstoy told: we are born alone and we die alone.  When we look at "the thing itself; unaccommodated man. . . such a poor bare, forked animal" (III, iv, 108-110), we learn along with Lear that we are formed by the force of finitude and the clock is always ticking.  No one can "unburthen" us.  If we ask our children to do so, we will be fortunate to hear Cordelia's reply.  To have love and duty returned in respectful regard is more than many receive or deserve.

          We raise our children to leave, and we cannot cleave to the harmful hope that they will organize their heart's energies around our accumulating debilities.  For all its individual facets, aging is a private country.  The character of Lear is a problematic pathfinder but he shows us the rectitude of righteous rage.  And he makes good on his claim--"I will do such things--/ What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be/ The terrors of the earth" (II, iv, 279-281).  He is a kind of perfect storm, and Dylan Thomas caught his power truly in these lines about his own father: "Do not go gentle into that good night/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

          There is an old proverb Lear probably should have heeded: "Don't undress before you die."  Astonished though we be at Lear's nakeding of himself,   we still marvel in the great grand clamor of his going.  We could do a lot worse with our own exits.  And probably will.