John Lithgow as King Lear? Excellent casting. I'd like to see that.

Gender fucking is totally relatable to our time and to me.

Sure, Shakespeare has verse and character conflicts that have stood up for 400 years, but he lacks fade-ins and fade-outs of hipster bands, and he lacks a reliably nasal detachment, so I'm gonna go with whatever half-assed opinion is arrived at in passing one evening and expressed in 140 characters by a guy who was pretty good ten years ago, before he got excessively impressed with himself, and before Showtime and Hollywood came calling.

I <3 me some TAL and Ira Glass, but really? Mr. Black nails it, with honorable mention to Elon for certain.

Of all the Shakespeare plays I've seen, I found Lear the most difficult to follow. Yeah, sure, I figured out the main plot and message by the end, but that play seriously invites the mind to wander to just about any other topic during the third act.

Lear also wasn't well received by contemporary audiences, fucking 16th century hipsters.

I'm confused. So the show is funny, but that's not to Shakespeare's credit? Wut??

Also, reading Romeo & Juliet in 9th grade was a game changer for me. I suddenly got what was going on, and it was a delight. Still probably my favorite book I HAD to read for a class (as opposed to ones I chose to read).

Shakespeare was probably a little more relatable in the first few hundred years after he wrote.

Methinks Mr. Glass has been reading too much YA fiction and his mind has gone to rot. Poor dear. Maybe if Shakespeare had written his plays in 10-15 minute acts with brief interludes in between, they'd be a little more digestible for his atrophied brain?

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy".
- Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio

Shakespeare via @ferret FTW.

@ 11, I disagree. More than any other of his plays, Shakespeare with Lear demonstrates the follies of pride and how our so-called elders can still be so very unwise. Further, no death in his entire body of work is as tragic as Cordelia's, and that is entirely due to the way he crafted that part of the plot. You know it's coming because "everyone dies" in a tragedy, but that one is still a gut punch. Shakespeare not ar his best? Only if his best is something that's lost to history.

Needing to find characters "relatable" seems about as rote Freshman Lit bullshit as "write about what you know." Neither is actually true about a lot of good literature and art. I'd be scared as hell, for instance, to meet the person who thought, say, Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" or two-thirds of the films of David Lynch were "relatable," but they're damn fine works. Yeah, Lear's a bloody, infuriating, bleak and chaotic monster of a play, and more power to it.

You know who is also unrelatable? Fucking J. S. Bach. His music videos are so boring. There is no dancing or anything.

If Bach wanted people in the future to enjoy his music, he should have included more electric guitars and drums.

This week on This American Life stories about people who shock their social network. We start with a radio personality commonly thought of as an intellectual who voiced opinions extremely unpopular in intellectual circles via microblog and experienced a remarkable diverse backlash.

I can see that Lear himself might be hard to relate to if you are under 40, but King Lear on PBS was the first performance of Shakespeare I ever saw, and I totally fell in love with Edgar and the Fool. I still remember hearing Edgar give his speech about "Why bastard? Wherefore base?" and a) being titillated by hearing somebody say "bastard" on public TV, and b) being totally outraged on Edgar's behalf at how *unfair* his position was, in that way that obvious unfairness outrages thirteen year olds. Then Shakespeare fucked with my thirteen year old head and made Edgar a sick, murderous bastard, not the Disney hero I was expecting. I love Shakespeare

What 13 said. And also-
"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport."
It'll happen to you too, Ira.

Ira is simply too young (and childless) to have experienced enough of life to find Lear "relatable".

@16 A minor correction: Edmund, not Edgar, is the character who rails against the unfairness of his position, giving the "Why bastard? Wherefore base?" speech. He's clearly a villain, but one of Shakespeare's most seductive ones, which has the effect drawing the audience into complicity.

Edgar is the "good" (and legitimate) son who spends most of the play in disguise, working behind the scenes.

Since the similarity of the names makes them easily confused, I tell my students that Edgar is Ed Good, and Edmund is Ed Mean.

As for the "relatability" of Lear, I think there are two aspects of the play that almost anyone should be able to relate to.

One is the issue of jealousy, rivalry, and competition within families. Nearly everyone has experienced some degree of family dysfunction, and families don't come much more dysfunctional than the Lears and the Gloucesters. I'd much rather watch a good production of "Lear" than sit through the two hours of pissing and moaning that is "August in Osage County."

The other is is the randomness of justice. Call it Fortuna or Fate or Cosmic Irony, but "Lear" truly does depict a world in which the gods "kill us for their sport," and at the end of the play, neither good nor evil seems to have triumphed. Instead, you have a world in which nearly everyone has died, and the few survivors are left basically saying "WTF?" If you've ever looked to the heavens and thought "Why me?" or "What's the point?" (and who among us hasn't), then you've got at least one point of access into Lear.

This thread, all its comments, their authors, Ira Glass and John Lithgow will all be forgotten and we'll still remember King Lear.

Maybe Ira Glass would appreciate Shakespeare more if we took a five-year hiatus from producing his works.

@ 20 I wonder, Tommy, if you view what you're suggesting as a good thing or a bad thing, because it sounds outrageously horrible to me.

Hell, why should anyone do anything if all we're ever going to remember is Shakespeare?

After all, his takes on the development of nuclear weapons, the decoding of the genome, and how African slavery set the United States on its current historical course are the exhaustive first and last words on these subjects.