Need

Earlier in the week, or possibly the week before, J Chris, one of our drama guys, asked me about something related to King Lear at flag-raising. This wasn't because he happened to be a key performer in our manic Kabuki-style Lear, part of the exuberant Competition Piece, but was more related to the very practical concerns of an oral examination he is about to take with King Lear as one of the texts. Specifically he wanted to know what the opening lines of Lear's O, reason not the need! speech meant.

This jarred me (in a nice sort of way) for two reasons. First of all, I can remember finding this a particularly odd speech when I did the play myself for 'A' level a small lifetime ago. The oddness came not from any especially difficult line, though getting one's head around Our Basest beggars / Are in the poorest things superfluous takes some effort, but from the dizzying perspectives on what humans can consider themselves (un)reasonably entitled to. After all, in the immediate context of Regan's cruel yet penetrating What need one? Lear has no actual need (whatever that is) of followers. I think it was only after several years had passed that I began to grasp the wisdom and unwisdom of Lear's denial of reason and the potentially explosive qualities of this realisation for how we live. (Isn't it odd how elemental this play is, how utterly primitive almost in the fundamental questions it poses about the most simple things of all?) Secondly, for some reason I've found myself thinking about this speech over the last couple of years, and how it relates to that strand of the drama that relates to issues of nature and need, rotating some of its implications for my own life. Chris's question, coming unexpectedly from nowhere, as it were, seemed to crystallise all this.

So I'm thinking about this now. How pervasive, yet undefined, our sense of need is. How it relates to our biological programming. How far such programming might be over-ridden. How far I would want to describe myself as needy. How our needs might affect our environment.

And going back to Shakespeare, what is true need? Lear cries out above all for patience and Edgar advises his blinded father to Bear free and patient thoughts. But just when you think you're been given some sort of answer, it's all taken from them.