Abstract
Drawing on Jan Kott, the essay emphasises how in King Lear the tragic and the grotesque dimensions are but two sides of the same coin, since a tragic situation becomes grotesque when both the alternatives of a forced choice are equally paradoxical, absurd or damaging. Hence the modernity of this Shakespearean tragedy and its closeness to Samuel Beckett’s theatre: indeed, it is only in King Lear that the great tragic scenes are enacted through a farce. In King Lear there is no redemption, as Lear’s pain is neither redeemable nor redeemed, and, in this sombre vision of reality, faith becomes absurd. “Ripeness is all”, Edgar maintains, and such ripeness is indeed the ability to live and die with the awareness that life is, despite everything, a cruel path towards a truth to conquer.