Lear and Retirement

From today's WSJ (Shakespeare’s Uncomfortable Message for Baby Boomers):

If “King Lear” is a lesson in the unexpected results of child-rearing, it also dramatizes the vicissitudes of retirement. It captures the existential abyss that can open when a once-solid identity begins to melt, and purpose gives way to purposelessness. Lear is deprived of his retinue and thrown out into a storm, reduced to his most elemental self—a “poor bare, forked animal.” We baby boomers, aging amid a technological landscape that changes at dizzying speed, must sympathize. We, too, face a storm that can make even the most successful among us feel lost and diminished.  

Lear rages at the ingratitude of his daughters and the crumbling of his regal identity, but these are ultimately stand-ins for a greater antagonist. Now on the downward curve of life, Lear faces the reality of death. Viewers and readers of the play can grasp this only when we reach the age when death, formerly hidden by the clutter of ambition and child-rearing, reveals itself.  

At that point “King Lear” counsels us to moderate our expectations and sense of entitlement with regard to our children, to accept a diminished professional identity as we age, and to be philosophical in the face of our inevitable mortality. These are profound messages but not cheerful ones, which is why “Lear” is both a great work and an unpopular one.