1. Shakespeare the Revolutionary

Watching a performance ofKingLear at London’s Barbican Theatre, I was struck not for the first time by Shakespeare’s awareness of poverty and inequality. Though his popularity and sheer brilliance during his lifetime kept him safe from the Tower, he was something of a revolutionary, an egalitarian long before the word or any of its strident political equivalents had found their way into our vocabulary. Passages, not only inLear but in other plays too, show evidence of a strong social conscience – at times stated quite bluntly and at others more subtly through the treatment and shaping of character.

InKingLear, part of the learning experience forced upon the eponymous hero, and also on the Earl of Gloucester, is recognition of economic injustice and of their own failures to address it during their long careers as powerful members of the elite – one a monarch, the other an aristocrat. Thus Gloucester, intent on suicide, hands his purse to his son Edgar, whom he believes to be a beggar, with these words:

Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man

That slaves your ordinance, that will not see

Because he does not feel, feel your pow’r quickly;

So distribution should undo excess,

And each man have enough.

It is a recipe for progressive taxation, for a generous benefit system, for a National Health Service, for what used to be called the welfare state.

King Lear on the heath in the midst of a violent storm goes further, as his sudden material i