Arthur W Frank Oxford University Press, 2022, HB, 176pp, £18.99, 978-0192846723
‘I’ll teach you differences ... ’ King Lear, Act I, Scene IV.
Arthur W Frank’s The Renewal of Generosity and The Wounded Storyteller are books that have made a huge impact on my medical practice. Frank now turns his attention to Shakespeare’s King Lear, acknowledged to be one of the greatest plays in the English language, and combines perceptive psychological insights with their application to the experience of serious illness.
Frank starts by exploring ‘vulnerable reading’, ‘which is how we read when some of it threatens who we are committed to believing we are’. Much of the book interrogates notions of vulnerability, consolation, suffering, differences, and transcendence. Vulnerable reading begins by seeing how a story mirrors our own suffering and realising that one’s suffering is shared. Lear asks ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’. A question we all face as we age.
Frank suggests vulnerability needs the solace of companionship so we need to read to develop relationships with the characters, to read for their vulnerabilities, to discover how they find consolation in their suffering.
Frank analyses King Lear in imaginative chapters: The Unravelling; The Refuge of Second Selves; The Lost, The Mad, and The Image of Horror; Reconciliations; Living with an Unpromised End; each divided by memorable lines and sections related to caring for patients.
In the last chapters he reflects on how Shakespeare’s writing can be therapeutic. Frank offers consolations found in King Lear. First, his words that can apply in different circumstances; his stories that can be retold in various ways. Frank thinks about ‘elsewhere’, when we experience shifts in identity in Elizabethan times but return to our world with changed perceptions. He speculates on transcendence –what does Lear suggest about human suffering in relation to what lies beyond the material world?
The book concludes with Frank’s letters to the various main characters in the play. Frank reflects on how the characters have become his companions, who can talk back to us if we learn to listen. It is difficult for me to encapsulate the wisdom shared in this thoughtful book in a short review. Read it and enrich your practice.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2024
