“Is this the promised end?”; Travels with/in King Lear

Abstract

This article began as a paper for the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa conference, “Shakespeare Towards an End” at Spier, Western  Cape, South Africa in May 2023. In its revised form it still seeks to connect to the conference title. There are three types of  journeys in King Lear: journeys away from (like Lear’s from Goneril to Regan); journeys towards (like almost everyone’s towards Dover);  and journeys without destination (Gloucester’s “I have no way”). From the chaotic, imprecise, unmappable travels within the play, there  is the possibility of charting the ways in which the play itself travels and what the ends (as aims) as well as end (as terminal) are that those charts might show, whether it be to Hull (Ben Benison’s Jack Lear), to Korea (Kim Myung-Gon’s King Uru) or to the United States  (Theatre of War’s King Lear Project), or by tracking the journeys into our awareness of characters Shakespeare excluded but whose  rethought inclusion serves to show what the play resists and how we might – even must – resist it.