I've been on a bit of a Shakespeare kick, after buying a Complete Works edition. This is encompassed in two ways - reading the play, and watching various versions of it in movie/recordings.
To start off, if you are unfamiliar with Shakespearean English, my recommendation is to begin with a movie that will give you both the plot and the English, rather than trying to read it. I typically read first, but I have also spent a significant amount of time reading works from Beowulf/Chaucer on up, so at this point I do have enough experience with it. A lot of the language is still reminiscent of 2nd or 3rd meanings of words today, but many people I've talked to have trouble with this because we aren't exposed to those meanings nearly as much nowadays. For me, the social traditions are where I need more assistance from commentary.
I will start with King Lear, so that I don't have to end with it. It is a bleak, bleak tragedy. Don't read it unless you're in the mood to feel depressed. An aging King Lear has three daughters and no heir, and wants to test his daughters' love for him. His favorite is the youngest, Cordelia. In a scene reminiscent of the fairy tale 'Water and Salt', the youngest daughter is construed to not love her father and thrown into exile in France.The King attempts to retire and stay with his two remaining daughters, but finds that he has lost all respect and is expected to become a nobody. He starts to go mad and his two elder daughters take over the kingdom, while his youngest daughter and the French king to come rescue him from the two eldest. The armies meet, and I won't tell you precisely what happens but this is one of Shakespeare's tragedies. A bleak one.
One of the themes this play explores is family ties and the effect of age. In that day and age, when you became too old to be productive you had no choice but to hope that someone of your kin would be kind enough to support you, knowing full well that they would be in the same position some day and hope that their own children would support them. Lear had a high enough opinion of his position that he felt it would be degrading to downsize his court, and his elder daughters thought him a fool of no worth and would not support his court. Once they had their inheritance, they cared nothing for the man who gave it to them. In this case, it is interesting also that Lear's retirement woes come about from the way he decided to retire. It is his own fault that he finds himself in that situation, which heightens the tragedy.
It is worth noting that this piece was written in England, a decisively western culture. In modern times, there appears to be a huge dichotomy between Eastern and Western cultures as regards aging and support. Western tradition views it as the government's responsibility to ensure that the aging parents are taken care of, through Welfare, Social Security, or whichever program is in place in any given country. Culturally, children are not required to take care of their parents, and it is viewed as a failure of the aging if they do not have enough money to live on without being parasites. In Tussian culture, there is [was?] no such expectation of government, in that the children know they will take care of their parents when the time comes. Lenora Greenbaum Ucko: Perceptions of Aging East and West: Soviet Refugees see two worlds. http://www.storieswork.org/aging_east_and_west.pdf. Something to add to my reading list is "Aging in East and West: Families, States, and the Elderly" by Bengtson, Kim, Myers, Eun.
There are two movie versions of this that I have seen. The first portrays Laurence Olivier as King Lear; the second James Earl Jones. Laurence Olivier is a master. There is nothing to say beyond that. I was incredibly depressed by his performance, which means that he carried it off and had precisely the desired effect. To see King Lear as a doddering old man, running mad from misuse and memories of past grandeur, abused and finally dying in delusion, serve to strip away any remaining gloss from the perception of human character. He is a tragedy by himself, a frail old man who is dying but refuses to see it. The second, with James Earl Jones, is less bleak than stark. Where Olivier's version has a gritty reality, Jones' version has more contrasting sets, with lighting/black/white contrast serve to show how desolate this madness really is. Olivier's Lear is more subtle, Jones' more overtly emtional. It's still a depressing play.
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