Reading “King Lear” During Hurricane Season

As Hurricane Milton barrelled toward Florida last month, I taught a three-hour Zoom class and tried not to refresh my phone for updates. I grew up in Florida, and my parents, along with my sister and her family, still live on the Atlantic Coast, a hundred and fifty miles from where Milton hit. All day, I’d responded to worried friends, telling them my family was fine, not their side of the state. But the mass of the storm was so big. Some friends who’d moved from Florida to Asheville, North Carolina, were still without power after the devastation of Helene.

On my class’s break, I saw an alert saying that a tornado had touched down in the county next to the one where my parents live. I texted. My mom said that it was loud outside, but they were safe. Their house is concrete, built to sustain most hurricanes, but the winds inside a tornado can get up to three hundred miles per hour. If a powerful one had touched down close enough to their house, they could have lost their roof.

Class ended and I signed off. I refreshed weather updates, watched storm-surge videos. On impulse, I picked up my old college copy of “King Lear” and looked through it for the scene of Lear raving at the storm.

“King Lear” is about lots of things—power, family, helplessness. It is also about language, both the slippery tricks of lies and the sometime solace of truth. It opens with a string of falsehoods that wreak havoc on nearly everyone. The only people who tell the truth are either disowned or condemned. The storm is the play’s reckoning, nature’s chaos come to laugh in the face of status, titles, greed—everything that everyone has lied to serve or to garner up till then.

In the scene, the King has cast himself out into a storm after a fight with his older daughters, who have lied to him, and he is slowly going mad. He rails and rages, is rendered ridiculous in the face of nature’s wrath: “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout.” Quickly, though, Lear’s anger shifts: “I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness. I never gave you kingdom, called you children; you owe me no subscription.” The storm’s indifference to Lear’s suffering is scary. But it’s the human lies, his daughters’ wicked self-interest, that hurt.

I grew up with hurricanes. On the news, there was talk of wobbles, shifting pressure systems, and hours and hours of spaghetti plots. Watches turned to warnings. Eyewalls formed. Anxious at nine, ten, eleven (as I still am at forty), I’d fill the bathtubs, get my little brother to help me pull a mattress into one of our closets. My sisters mostly ignored me; our parents were at work. Almost always, the storm missed us. Embarrassed, sorry, I’d have to bring the canned foods I’d stashed in my room back to the pantry, lug my mattress back onto my bed.

Since 1980, the proportion of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean that develop to a Category 3 or higher has roughly doubled. The biggest shift, due largely to the increase in ocean temperatures, is the storms’ ability to so rapidly intensify, thereby making it that much more difficult to prepare. In 2004 and 2005, my home town had three direct hits in just over a year, and my husband—he’s from the same place—still talks about the futile-feeling terror and exhaustion of that stretch of time.

After Irma, in 2017, and Dorian, in 2019—among the strongest hurricanes ever to make landfall on the Atlantic Coast—my husband’s parents, having lived in Florida for more than ninety years between them, left. My parents, who have both lived in Florida nearly their whole lives, stayed. They have a shared business there, not to mention friends and grandchildren. They have shutters and a generator, that concrete house. As the storms have grown worse, insurance premiums have spiked, but my parents mostly prefer not to talk about it.

In May, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, signed a bill de-prioritizing clean energy and removing from state legislation the majority of references to climate change. On October 10th, standing amid the wreckage of the tornado near my parents’ house, he said, “There’s precedent for all this in history. Like, it is hurricane season—you are going to have tropical weather.”

Not everyone can leave, and plenty of people do not want to. The warm water, the Everglades, the torpor-inducing stick of heat and salt on skin—it still sometimes feels unthinkable to me that anyone would live anywhere else. We’re in New York now but go back often. For the past decade, driving the same roads I’ve driven my whole life, my brain has spiralled: on stark-blue sunny days, along perfect, often flat-watered beach, I can’t help but imagine blown-down houses; storm surge; crashing, roiling waves.

On the wall above my desk, I have a Post-it note with a quote from “King Lear”: “The worst is not so long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’ ” I keep it there as a bolster, a comfort. I put it on another office wall last year, when a mass shooting happened thirty miles from our house.

“Lear” is generally considered Shakespeare’s most apocalyptic, nihilistic play (and perhaps his most perfect). As in lots of other Shakespeare, almost everybody is dead by the end. Samuel Johnson famously wrote that he couldn’t stomach rereading the final scenes for years, so devastated was he by Cordelia’s death. Seventy-five years after the play was first performed, Nahum Tate rewrote it with a rosier ending. Lear regains his throne; Cordelia lives; she and Edgar marry. For a hundred and fifty years, this version displaced the original.

The Tate play is, of course, not nearly as well made, but people love to feel good, draw clean, easy lines and luxuriate in happy endings. Chekhov is said to have remarked that it’s always in the beginnings and the ends that we feel the greatest pull toward lies. What the real “Lear” offers is murkier, less easy, but it’s that lack of ease that makes it feel, to me, much more like life.

The Post-it line is delivered by a character named Edgar. His half brother, Edmund, has convinced their dad, the Earl of Gloucester, that Edgar is plotting to kill him. Edgar has spent the last stretch disguised as a beggar, also suffering out in the storm. Gloucester has been tortured, had his eyes gouged out, but he is finally able to see that Edmund lied. “I am worse than e’er I was,” Edgar declares, just before his injured father stumbles toward him. Then he adds, as an aside to the audience, “The worst is not so long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’ ”

One of the reasons I love the line is that it feels comic in a play that’s mostly tragic. Edgar starts out as a little silly, easily duped, and then becomes absurdly sad. The line is him throwing up his hands. Also, it feels true: Edgar declares the worst but then more life comes, both worse and better. He declares the worst, yet he cannot know—even those of us who are always looking for the worst cannot know—what might come next. A few scenes later, in a thrilling trick of language, Edgar saves his dad from suicide.

Eventually, Lear is also reunited with his only honest daughter, the formerly disowned Cordelia, though they’re quickly imprisoned and condemned to death by Edmund. But here’s Lear:

We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.

When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh.

Lear has lost his title, status, land, and power, but he has his daughter. He wants to sit with her, to sing and talk. As slippery, manipulative, and meagre as language can be, it is also, in this moment, suture, mercy. Of course, the play is still tragic. Cordelia dies soon afterward. And then, holding her in his arms and begging her to breathe, Lear dies of grief.

For a long time, my parents and I disagreed about most everything: money, politics, the climate, who of us was lying, and why. We went stretches without speaking. I felt fury. I felt certain that the only way they’d love me was if I lied. A few weeks ago, I sent them a novel I wrote in which I tried to tell the truth. I don’t think they enjoyed it. When my mom finished reading it, she called me. She told me that she loved me. She understood that I loved her. A small, good thing amid the murk.

Being alive right now can feel like hacking through lies, grasping desperately for truth. The sense that the chaos cannot, will not, stop. To claim to know, to make order, to offer hope, feels false. One of the gifts of “Lear,” to me, is that the play doesn’t give hope. Instead, it grounds you—after pages of manipulation and condemnations, of a king railing and a storm raging—in the fleeting but real value of speaking, sharing, something true. ♦