Shakespeare’s famous character King Lear is certainly not a sexual predator. But he does have something in common with the now-fallen kings of journalism Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and Charlie Rose: He is around 70.

Staff on The Charlie Rose Show quietly referred to the younger women the 75-year-old Rose hired as “Charlie’s Angels.”

And the unsolicited shoulder-rubs Rose gave his “angels” were referred to by staffers as “the crusty paw” treatment.

Crusty paw.

That’s a hint to every near-70-year-old man that he had better hurry up and read or re-read King Lear, sooner rather than later.

The play unmasks the mind of old men in power and the insecurity afflicting such men when a youth-worshipping world starts looking at them as “crusty paws.”

Lear dehumanizes the women around him — his daughters Regan, Goneril and Cordelia. He transforms them into scores in the game of life, into potential “likes” on his royal Facebook page.

He destroys himself by manipulating the women around him as he seeks feedback to prove to himself that he is loved.

“The one who loves me best shall fare the best” he declares as he retires his royal robes and publicly divides his kingdom at court, in front of his sole heirs (his three daughters).

He baits them by dividing his kingdom into three somewhat equal parts.

According to some women invited by Rose to apply for jobs on his interview show (even in the six-figure pay range), Rose used a similar strategy to Lear’s: “The one who loves me best shall fare the best,” except that in Rose’s case love meant lust.

And it meant women were expected to tolerate his leering advances, including the old-man-in-the-open-bathrobe trick.

Cordelia, Lear’s youngest daughter (in her 20s), refuses to give Lear the phony “likes” he seeks. She wants her father’s love, not his real estate.

She too can make declarations and says to him that she doesn’t have “that slick and oily art to speak, and purpose not” which her greedy sisters have mastered so well.

She won’t allow the old man to manipulate her even if it means losing her inheritance; when Lear asks what she will say to equal or outdo her sisters’ protestations of love, she replies, honestly, “Nothing.”

Lear growls, “Nothing? Nothing will come of nothing.”

With a dramatic, angry royal flourish of his crusty paw he cuts Cordelia out.

Regan and Goneril (who are in their 40s) go into overdrive, flooding Lear with flattery, drooling over the parts of the kingdom they want most.

Did Ailes, O’Reilly and Rose, kings of journalism that they were, seriously believe the junior women in their professional worlds who they approached inappropriately actually found their crusty paws attractive?

C’mon.

It was the fame and power that lured the young women, not the balding, wrinkled creatures themselves.

Wake up, modern King Lears: You are grown old in a world that worships youth.

And you are made fools in exact and equal proportion to your need to be flattered by the young.

Recently, a grotesque variation of Lear’s desperate need to feel powerful was acted out in Africa.

After 37 years as president of Zimbabwe, 93-year-old Robert Mugabe resigned rather than face proceedings begun by the nation’s Legislature to impeach him.

He had sacked his vice president in order to engineer his 52-year-old wife, Grace Mugabe, into position to succeed him as president.

But it backfired.

And so we see that King Lear is not just a 400-year-old tragedy acted out on a theater stage.

All the world’s a stage, even Zimbabwe, Fox News and the Charlie Rose interview program.

The dramatic fate of Mugabe, Ailes, O’Reilly and Rose tell us so.

And let us not forget this: There is another needy, insecure male actor in his 70s manipulating power on that stage too.

Thankfully, like Mugabe, he is a president.

Not a king.

Paul Keane lives in Hartford.