[You] have all heard of the fellow who went to see Hamlet and came out saying ‘That was rubbish. Some bloke just wandered round the stage quoting Shakespeare.’

A joke – but not entirely so. Even those who have never read or seen a Shakespeare play are likely to be familiar with a few of his lines, as so many of them have assimilated themselves into our everyday conversation. Why are his words still alive, breathing freely out of context in the 21st Century? Because nothing ever changes. Human emotions are a constant throughout history, and Shakespeare simply managed to describe them better than we could.

The most oft-quoted line from King Lear is

‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is

To have a thankless child.’

The words spangle with eternal relevance. Parents will always make sacrifices for their children, and always have days when they wonder why there’s no gratitude for it. Children will always have days when they resent having to be grateful for what their parents gave them. (‘I didn’t ask to be born! I didn’t ask to be sent to school! I didn’t ask to have the kingdom divided three ways between myself and my evil sisters…’)

King Lear is the story of an old man who decides to divide his property evenly between his three daughters before his death. He is ready to give each girl a third of the kingdom – provided that she makes a speech first, declaring her love for him before the court. His elder daughters Gonerill and Regan fall over themselves to make this declaration and cop the loot. His youngest daughter, Cordelia, refuses. She is a lot like her father: stubborn. He’s damn well decided that he’s going to hear this speech of love, so she damn well decides that he won’t.

Of course Lear is asking for something rather specific, and perhaps not superficially relevant to our common-law 21st Century lives: that is, the particular obeisance due to a king. His daughters are also his subjects, and he believes they owe him royal duty. Nevertheless, the essential problem rings true down the years: how much does a parent give freely with no expectation of return? Is there such a thing as unconditional love?

When Lear offers to give away the kingdom, he is relinquishing land but not power. This is a gift attached to a piece of elastic, the other end clasped in the king’s firm hand. His daughter Gonerill says

‘Idle old man,

That still would manage those authorities

That he hath given away!’

Few characters in literature are as repulsively cruel as Gonerill Duchess of Albany, but even she is not a hundred percent wide of the mark.

Here one might think of the middle-class father who pays the deposit for his daughter to buy her first flat. Does he truly think of the flat as her own, or simply his? Is he deliberately ‘giving’ independence in order to secretly retain control – to prevent her from finding a real independence on her own? In such cases, many a modern daughter’s natural gratitude for her father’s generosity has clashed with her desire for true freedom.

Four hundred years after King Lear, in Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Swimming Pool Library, narrator Will Beckwith tells us that he never invites his grandfather to his flat: ‘Since my grandfather had more or less bought the flat for me, I churlishly resented any interest in it on his part.’

Something not unlike this, perhaps, is in the mind of Cordelia as she rejects what she considers to be a conditional gift from her father. In fury, he disowns her and casts her from the court.

As the subsequent tragedy unfolds, Lear must learn to soften his paternal and regal pride, and Cordelia must learn to see (and forgive) the man behind it. Yes, this is the peculiar case of a king and his heirs, but are not all our fathers king to begin with? The best fathers are fair and loving kings, but they all have trouble with accession. Every daughter must begin by relying on and deferring to her father absolutely, then gradually notice the limits of his power, then understand he can make mistakes, then learn to forgive them.

Oh, but how we love our fathers in all their power and lack of it. From early childhood when we want to marry them, to later adulthood when we’re scared of losing them, it is an intense, aching, almost romantic love between girl children and their male parents. Whatever the distance of time, however specific the requirements of kingly duty, we can see that special passion in this play and respond to it with tears.

When father and daughter are finally reunited, it is with romantic poetry that Lear embraces the notion of being imprisoned with Cordelia forever.

‘Come, let’s away to prison:

We too alone will sing like birds I’ the cage;

When thou dost ask me blessing I’ll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness; so we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies…’

It is a beautiful, impossible dream and no girl who ever loved her father can hear it with dry eyes.

The terms on which we forge bonds with our fathers are terms that we know must change. Our fathers know that we will grow up and fall in love with other men. We know that our fathers will grow old and die. We love them, and they love us back, with an intensity that can only be strengthened by the knowledge and fear of transience. We know that we will hurt each other, and can only hope that forgiveness will come easily and never too late.

Sometimes, when they get older, we can feel our fathers slipping away even as we hug them; maybe they felt something similar when we were small. But sometimes, if we’re lucky enough still to be hugging our fathers in our adulthood, it feels exactly the same as it did when we were kids. At that moment we can dream that it really will be the same forever: that somewhere there is a magic fairytale room where we will always live with our beloved fathers, and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies.

http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/static/cs/uk/10/minisites/shakespeare/readmore/kinglear.html