​Alfred North Whitehead on
​the Egotistical Desire for Fame
​

...the egotistic desire for fame—‘that last infirmity’—is an inversion of the social impulse, and yet presupposes it. The tendency shows itself in the trivialities of child-life, as well as in the career of some conqueror before whom mankind trembled. In the widest sense, it is the crav­ing for sympathy. It involves the feeling that each act of experience is a central reality, claiming all things as its own. The world has then no justification except as a satisfaction of such claims. But the point is that the desire for admiring attention becomes futile except in the presence of an audience fit to render it. The pathology of feeling, so often exemplified, consists in the destruction of the audience for the sake of the fame. There is also, of course, the sheer love of command, finally devoid of high purpose. The complexity of human motive, the entwinement of its threads, is infinite. The point, which is here relevant, is that the zest of human adventure presupposes for its material a scheme of things with a worth beyond any single occa­sion. However perverted, there is required for zest that craving to stand conspicuous in this scheme of things as well as the purely per­sonal pleasure in the exercise of faculties. 

- Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

Process Theology and King Lear

​Shakespeare's King Lear is the story of a broken family in a godless universe where a proud and vain king, obsessed with being flattered, believes his authority and power are absolute. He is impulsive and quick-tempered, prone to making rash decisions that often have disastrous consequences. In the end he goes mad. No one will tell him the truth. Beneath it all is a need to be flattered, to stand conspicuous in the scheme of things. He seeks sympathy. He wants to be loved.

Some even believe that the need to be flattered, the craving for sympathy, is a quality of the heavenly One, who sits on a throne, like King Lear, seeking flattery and praise. They render unto God that which belongs to Caesar, as Whitehead observes.

Process theology provides an alternative to this way of thinking about God. Whitehead presents God as a gentle force at work in the universe, who quietly and patiently operates through love.

There is, however, in the Galilean origin of Christianity yet another suggestion which does not fit very well with any of the three main strands of thought. It does not emphasize the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover. It dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love; and it finds purpose in the present immediacy of a kingdom not of this world. Love neither rules, nor is it unmoved; also it is a little oblivious as to morals. It does not look to the future; for it finds its own reward in the immediate present.

One lesson of King Lear is that an obsession with flattery can indeed lead to madness, human or divine. A better option is to walk humbly, without needing to be famous. Make no mistake, process theologians no less than kings can fail to learn this lesson. Obsessive self-promotion, even in the name of ostensibly good ideas, is repugnant to most of us. And gentleness of spirit is attractive, even if combined with a bit of lunacy.

There is a character in King Lear who has gentle lunacy: namely one of his courtiers, the court jester, often called "the fool." Only he can speak truthfully, albeit in the language of riddle and paradox and babbling. He offers comic and wise relief from madness of the king.

Truth be told, most of us admire the fool.  We find something wise and beautiful in the Galilean vision Whitehead presents, foolish as it is by worldly standards. And we may even find ourselves pitying those who fall into the egotistical desire for fame, knowing that they seek sympathy. Nevertheless, when their desire for sympathy is combined with a sheer love of command, the results are dangerous. We have autocrats.

The beckoning of God, so process theology suggests, is for the non-autocratic, the quiet and gentle, secure in the fact that it need not control the world because already loved. 

Perhaps Lear himself, at the end, discovered something of this wisdom. Throughout the course of the play, Lear undergoes a profound transformation, moving from a proud and arrogant monarch to a humble and penitent old man who recognizes the error of his ways and the importance of human compassion and empathy.

In the final scenes of the play, Lear is deeply moved by the death of his beloved daughter Cordelia, and his heartbreak and sorrow are palpable. He recognizes the folly of his actions and the injustice of the world, and he laments his own role in bringing about his downfall and the suffering of those around him. He tastes the truth we wish he'd known all along: the gentleness of a broken heart that does not need fame and which does not look to the future because its reward, the gentleness itself, is in the present.

​- Jay McDaniel

The Plot
​

​At the beginning of the play, King Lear decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. He asks each of them to declare their love for him, and based on their responses, he decides to give the largest share to Goneril and Regan, while banishing Cordelia from the kingdom.

After dividing the kingdom, Lear realizes that he has made a grave mistake, as Goneril and Regan turn against him and refuse to care for him in his old age. He is forced to flee his own kingdom and is eventually reduced to wandering the countryside, accompanied only by his loyal court jester, Fool, and a kind-hearted nobleman, Kent.
​
Throughout the play, Lear's relationship with his daughters deteriorates further, and he begins to lose his grip on reality. His two eldest daughters betray and manipulate him, and he suffers a complete mental breakdown.

​Eventually, Cordelia returns to the kingdom and attempts to help her father, but it is too late, and the play ends in tragedy as many of the main characters, including Lear and his daughters, die.

King Lear: Act 1, Scene 1
​

​King Lear: A Scholarly Discussion

Melvyn Bragg and Guests on BBC

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss King Lear. Around the turn of 1606, a group of London theatre-goers braved the plague to take in a new play by the well-known impresario, Mr William Shakespeare. Packed into the Globe Theatre, they were treated to a tale of violence, hatred and betrayal so upsetting that it thereafter languished among Shakespeare’s less popular plays.The story of Lear – of a man who divides up his property and loses the love of a daughter - is an ancient and ultimately happy one. But in the hands of William Shakespeare it became a shocking and violent vision of a broken family in a godless universe. So shocking that after the playwright’s death it was shunned and rewritten with a happy ending. Only in the 19th and 20th centuries did Shakespeare’s bleak, experimental and disorientating drama attain the status it has now. But why did Shakespeare take a story from the deep history of Britain and make it so shockingly his own and when, from the Civil War to the Second World War, did this powerful and confusing tragedy emerge as Shakespeare’s greatest? With Jonathan Bate, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick; Katherine Duncan-Jones, Tutorial Fellow in English at Somerville College, Oxford; Catherine Belsey, Research Professor in English at the University of Wales, Swansea

King Lear

Laurence Olivier and John Hurt

"Laurence Olivier and John Hurt played respectively Lear and the Fool in this production to great acclaim, winning an Emmy for his performance. It was the last of Olivier's appearances in a Shakespeare play. At 75, he was one of the oldest actors to take on this enormously demanding role."