Madness in William Shakespeare's King LearIn "East Coker," TS Eliot pleads "Let me not hear / Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly…." (Eliot 185) The madness of old men must surely be a central trope in any discussion of Shakespeare's towering tragic achievement, King Lear. Traditional interpretations of the play, drawing on classical Aristotelian theory of tragedy, tend to see Lear's act of blind madness as hamartia, hastening the disintegration of human society. In the ensuing crisis, “the fundamental bonds of nature collapse to reveal a chaos in which humanity 'must prey upon itself like monsters of the abyss'” and “evil is immanent and overflows from the smallest breach in nature.” (Mercer 252) Modernist interpretations gave this scenario an existential twist, treating Lear as a representative of Man, lost in a nihilistic universe. Thus Joyce Carol Oats writes that "the few survivors of the drama experience [the conclusion] as an 'image' of the horror of the Apocalypse, that is, an anticipation of the end of the world". He concludes that "we are left with nothing but a minimal stoicism.... To what end? - to turn the wheel completely around, it would seem, back to the primary zero, the nothingness that is an underlying horror or promise everywhere." (Avena 215)I. A postmodern Shakespeare But Jan Kott has suggested that "although Shakespeare is almost always, in one sense or another, our contemporary, there are moments when, to paraphrase George Orwell, he is more contemporary than others." (Elsom 11) If, as is widely agreed, we are in a new cultural period that is in some sense “postmodern,” (Jameson 1) then the texts of a culture have seen the emergence of basic structures and dynamics. ..... middle of paper ......dge, 1989.Grady, Hugh. Shakespeare's Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Laing, R. D. The Politics of Experience. New York: Pantheon, 1967.Marx, Karl. The eighteenth brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1869. Nineteenth-Century Europe: Liberalism and Its Critics. Eds. Jan Goldstein and John W. Boyer.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. 242-266.Mercer, Peter. "Tradidia". A dictionary of modern critical terms. Ed. Roger Fowler. London: Routledge, 1991. 250-253. Oates, Joyce Carol. “‘Is This the Promised End?’: The Tragedy of King Lear.” Journal of aesthetics and art criticism. Autumn, 1974.Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Ed. RA Foakes. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000.