The Old Man and the Heath

Shakespeare reimagined in a novel of King Lear, resurrected from the heath to bear witness at time’s end, and six stories that present the Bard’s bit characters anew

Norman Lock recasts King Lear as a survivor of Shakespeare’s tragic play, condemned to live as an old man forever on the heath, where the bucolic landscape evolves into a post-industrial ruin. Reduced from the pinnacle of power to the depths of homelessness and servitude, Lear observes history’s processional across the centuries. In the seventeenth century, he witnesses the stoning of a young woman, whose martyrdom is commemorated by pilgrims who erect a cathedral to house her bones. Later, he must eke out a living as the site becomes a garrison for Cromwell’s soldiers; then an abbey during the plague; a shoe factory at the start of the Industrial Revolution; a military hospital during the First and Second World Wars; a late twentieth-century Shakespearean repertory theater; a swank apartment building; and, in the near future, a “shooting gallery” from which he rescues a young woman whom he names Cordelia.

In the companion stories to Lear’s tale, Lock brings six of Shakespeare’s minor characters to center stage, where they emerge from their traditional roles in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, and Hamlet.

An homage to Shakespeare’s enduring hold on our imagination, The Old Man and the Heath is a triumph of originality and invention.