ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s Lear has had everything – power, status, the capacity to bequeath vast gifts and thunder his commands – and he unthinkingly gives it all away, assuming an easy exchange of land for vows of love. But the meaning of words can shift from the very instant that they leave one person’s mouth and enter the ears of another. Cordelia is the first of Lear’s rejects, soon joined by the Earl of Kent, Gloucester’s son Edgar, and the Fool, all characters who in different ways hold mirrors up to the frail ex-king and his doppelganger, Gloucester. The fact that two once-powerful old men are willing to peer, as best they can, into the glasses held up by their companions is the source of their true majesty. Shakespeare’s play embodies and scrutinizes loss of belonging, loss of authority, loss of face and, ultimately, loss itself as an elemental experience.
