Reading King Lear in the Age of Trump

Yes, my photoshop skills are actually this bad.

Two years ago, I wrote “Comrade with the Wolf and Owl,” a short piece arguing that King Lear offers powerful commentary on the consumer culture of the twenty-first century. I have continued to read and teach the play to university students since then, and last month as the summer semester began, standing in front of a full lecture hall, I was struck by a revelation. I found myself making this comment: “This is the first time I’m reading King Lear in the Age of Trump. I’m not quite sure how that will change the play for me. But I know it will.”

Trump the brain virus. Trump the black hole. Trump the psychic vampire feasting on the bloodstream of our minds. (How much time have you spent thinking and talking and fretting about him in the past year? What else could you have accomplished with that time? Even at this very moment, typing these words, I deeply resent having to spend some small part of my finite life trying to organize some thoughts about him.)

We are desperate to explain Trump, to somehow make sense of him, and comparisons to Shakespeare’s vain, mad king seem inevitable. They are also becoming more and more compelling, and they are starting to appear with greater frequency as the Trump administration crumbles before our eyes. Anna North, writing in The New York Times on May 17, noted that “Donald Trump is looking a bit like King Lear these…