At 82, she does not look whittled, wizened or weathered or any one of those wheezy words we use for old bodies. She does not look diminished — she looks distilled, unwrapped, the long bare branches of her body mesmerizing. “Glenda is so lean, and I don’t just mean that physically,” the actor Elizabeth Marvel, who plays Goneril, told me. “I mean that emotionally, intellectually. All the fat is burned off, and you just have this brilliant diamond core.” Jackson is not the first woman to play Lear, nor does gender enter your mind as you watch her. She herself has spoken of how differences between the sexes fade with age, but her authority has always transcended any notion of gender; it has always felt like law. The first time she played Shakespeare, in 1965, one review was headlined “Ophelia, Prince of Stratford.”
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