Classics
Harlan County would have been surprised to know that Raylan Givens had a taste for Shakespeare. He'd been forced to read Hamlet in high school, and he'd liked it so much he'd moved on to the next play in his textbook, King Lear. That's where he'd found Edgar and Edmund—half brothers, yin and yang, one determined in the direction of good, the other equally determined in the direction of evil, but both uncompromising in their methods. He'd decided the day he read it that westerns, which he loved, weren't all that different from the Bard's works. Less guns and more swords, but that was about the only thing that separated them.
Life in Harlan always seemed a little more epic in scope than the rest of the world, even while it smothered its inhabitants with a claustrophobia borne of everything being the same as it had been for the past hundred—or two hundred—years. Boyd Crowder was a man of his county. People up in Lexington who read the accounts of his exploits probably didn't quite understand, Raylan thought. They saw his fires as the little rage of a hillbilly. But there was much, much more to it than that. Boyd might be certifiably insane, but it was insanity with a curious beauty about it, a deeply compelling curse that made him seem like a snake who did the charming instead of being charmed. Boyd was anything but small.
It wasn't until Raylan returned to Harlan that he realized his own role in the tale. Where there's an Edmund railing against fate and using his misfortunes to justify murder and rage, there must be an Edgar, whose equally white-hot rage justifies a severity that stamps out evil wherever it's found. Boyd had chosen his side, and Raylan easily chose his own. Hadn't he always suspected that life was meant to be lived in a more heightened way than the drones in Miami chose to experience it?
Raylan had never wanted to return to Harlan County, but it was his reassignment and subsequent re-acquaintance with the brilliantly twisted Boyd Crowder that finally cast him in the role he was born to play. He wasn't sure if he was part of a Shakespearean tragedy or a classic western, but did it really matter? There wasn't much difference.