Traumatised by Lear, Johnson couldn’t reread the last scenes until he was compelled to edit them. According to Hazlitt, he approved the imposition on it of a happy ending which was the calculated practice of the contemporary stage. Tolstoy forgot himself in animosity towards the play and tried to wreck its reputation, because—according to Orwell—it presented too precise an account of his own failures, and fate. Lear is as memorable as a trauma; it’s also memorable in the way a trauma is. It attests: life is like ‘a lasting storm’, whirring us from our friends.
