King Lear

By Joseph Pearce and William Shakespeare

Edited by Joseph Pearce

Contributors to this volume:
James Bemis
Paul A. Cantor
Robert Carballo, Ph.D.
Scott Crider
Joseph Pearce
Jack Trotter
R.V. Young

One of the most popular of Shakespeare's plays, King Lear is also one of the most thought-provoking. The play turns on the practical ramifications of the words of Christ that we should render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's. When confronted with the demand that she should render unto Caesar that which is God's, Cordelia chooses to ""love and be silent"". As the play unfolds each of the principal characters learns wisdom through suffering. This edition includes new critical essays by some of the leading lights in contemporary literary scholarship.

The Ignatius Critical Editions represent a tradition-oriented alternative to popular textbook series such as the Norton Critical Editions or Oxford World Classics, and are designed to concentrate on traditional readings of the Classics of world literature. While many modern critical editions have succumbed to the fads of modernism and post-modernism, this series will concentrate on tradition-oriented criticism of these great works.
Edited by acclaimed literary biographer, Joseph Pearce, the Ignatius Critical Editions will ensure that traditional moral readings of the works are given prominence, instead of the feminist, or deconstructionist readings that often proliferate in other series of 'critical editions'. As such, they represent a genuine extension of consumer-choice, enabling educators, students and lovers of good literature to buy editions of classic literary works without having to 'buy into' the ideologies of secular fundamentalism.
The series is ideal for anyone wishing to understand great works of western civilization, enabling the modern reader to enjoy these classics in the company of some of the finest literature professors alive today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Jan 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781681492452

Joseph Pearce

Joseph Pearce is the author of numerous literary works including Literary Converts, The Quest for Shakespeare and Shakespeare on Love, and the editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions series. His other books include literary biographies of Oscar Wilde, J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

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KING LEAR: AN INTRODUCTION

R.V. Young

North Carolina State University

For much of the twentieth century King Lear was widely regarded as Shakespeare’s greatest play and possibly as the greatest tragic drama of all. Although nothing has occurred to alter this judgment, it is important to recall that numerous figures, some of them as distinguished as the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, have found the play vulgar and absurd. More telling, it has often been considered impossible to act and stage successfully. In fact, in 1681 the Restoration hack Nahum Tate (1652-1715) rewrote King Lear so that Cordelia survives, marries Edgar, and lives happily ever after as Queen of England. Subsequently, this was the only version of King Lear known to have been produced in the theatre until 1838.¹ No less a critic than Dr. Samuel Johnson acquiesced in this preference for the final triumph of persecuted virtue:

In the present case the public has decided. Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add anything to the general suffrage, I might relate, I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.²

In some respects, then, King Lear appears insufficiently tragic, tainted by unseemly comedy and the improbabilities of fairy tale and romance; viewed from another perspective it seems all too tragic, even insupportable in the horror of its ending.

While several earlier generations of actors, directors, and audiences dealt with the terrible catastrophe of the play by romanticizing its denouement and mitigating its terrors, in the twentieth century remorseless cruelty and violence were emphasized, and King Lear was treated as an anticipation of the existentialist nihilism of the Theatre of the Absurd. Productions in the 1950s and ‘60s stripped away every vestige of dignity and hope, reducing Lear and his allies to the semblance of Samuel Becket’s alienated and disoriented characters. An age that had witnessed two devastating world wars and the horrors of Nazi death camps and Soviet show trials and contrived famines seemed to many critics and directors the first truly able to respond to the negation of all order and meaning they found implied in the text of King Lear.

Shakespeare wrote the play, however, for an audience that knew as well as modern men and women about the abominable deeds of the wicked and the terrible suffering created by human vice and folly. Yet the actual text of the play suggests that Shakespeare’s society still retained the spiritual and moral resources—even if they were then threatened—to contemplate the representation of such evil with neither sentimental evasion nor the cynical despair. King Lear dramatizes grand themes: the crisis of natural law and the challenge to Christian belief, which marked the waning of the Renaissance; but it does so within a tale that is intimate and domestic as well as national and political. If, as Chesterton maintains, Saint Thomas Aquinas is the philosopher of common sense and the common man, Shakespeare may not unreasonably be termed playwright of common sense and the common man, for his vision of the human condition assumes that the health of society depends upon the character of the individual men and women it comprises. In King Lear, the destruction of a nation and a social order begins in the disordered relations of fathers and their children; lapses of personal virtue lead inexorably to terrifying political consequences.

Interpretation of this complex tragedy may well begin by noticing the obsessive repetition of the words nature and natural by many of its principal characters in incompatible, even contradictory, senses. In proclaiming to Cordelia’s suitors, the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy, that he has just disinherited and disowned her, Lear calls her a wretch whom nature is ashamed / Almost t’acknowledge hers (I.i.213-14). The King of France, finding this turn of events most strange, remarks, Sure her offense / Must be of such unnatural degree / That monsters it [. . .] (I.i.214, 219-21). When he quarrels with his eldest daughter, Goneril, he admits that Cordelia’s most small fault [. . .] / like an engine wrenched my frame of nature / From the fixed place, drew from my heart all love / And added to the gall (I.iv.258-62). He invokes Nature as a dear goddess to curse his eldest daughter with sterility, so that her physical condition will mirror her moral corruption (I.iv.267ff.). Similarly, the Earl of Gloucester, convinced by his illegitimate son, Edmund, that Edgar, the eldest son and heir, has betrayed his father, calls him an unnatural, detested, brutish villain (I.ii.76) and subsequently lauds Edmund as a loyal and natural boy (II.i.84).

Calling Edmund natural is, however, ironically ambiguous, since a natural child could refer either to a legitimate child begotten naturally in the course of marriage or to an illegitimate child begotten through mere natural inclination—in other words, a bastard, as Edmund literally is.³ In a powerful soliloquy the guileful Edmund invokes a goddess of very different character than the Nature upon whom Lear and his father call:

     Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law

     My services are bound. Wherefore should I

     Stand in the plague of custom, and permit

     The curiosity of nations to deprive me?

     For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines

     Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base?

     When my dimensions are as well compact,

     My mind as generous and my shape as true

     As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us

     With base? With baseness, bastardy? Base, base?

     Who in the lusty stealth of nature take

     More composition and fierce quality

     Than doth within a dull stale tired bed

     Go to the creating of a whole tribe of fops

     Got ‘tween a sleep and wake. Well, then,

     Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.

     Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund

     As to the legitmate. Fine word, legitimate!

     Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed

     And my invention thrive, Edmund the base

     Shall top the legitimate. I grow, I prosper:

     Now gods, stand up for bastards!

(I.ii.1-22)

The seductive vigor of Edmund’s rhetoric and the sense that the ignominy and disadvantages of illegitimacy are—especially to a modern audience—unfair create a good deal of initial sympathy for him, despite the fact that he is engaged in a vicious scheme to deceive his father and deprive his brother and endanger his life. Moreover, Edmund’s championing of an idea of the natural as what is opposed to the merely conventional or traditional will likewise seem very appealing to contemporary culture, with its bias in favor of the individual and against the rules and strictures of the community, especially whatever is inherited from the past.

Edmund and the characters allied with him may thus be regarded as representing a vision of nature and the law of nature that challenges and threatens what was in Shakespeare’s day the more traditional conception of nature and natural law, associated with Lear and Gloucester and the characters who support them. As John F. Danby observes, "The universal playwright, without self-contradiction, can include Hooker and Hobbes in the same play [. . .]. There is a real sense in which King Lear incorporates the living parts of both Ecclesiastical Polity and Leviathan."⁴ Danby is indulging in a paradoxical whimsy. Although Shakespeare would certainly have known about the first five books of Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593, 1597) and may well have read them, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) did not appear until thirty-five years after the poet’s death and nearly half a century after the composition of King Lear. Nevertheless, Danby makes a significant point: Hooker’s treatise was in Shakespeare’s day the most recent articulation of an ancient vision of the human condition that furnished the intellectual foundation for the moral attitudes of Lear and Gloucester, of Kent, Edgar, and Cordelia. It would only be decades later, in the aftermath of a decade of civil war and the beheading of a lawfully anointed king, that the contrary view could be fully and openly proclaimed in a work of serious political philosophy.

In the course of defending the governing hierarchy and liturgical worship of the Church of England from radical puritans, who demanded that every aspect of institutional religion be justified by reference to a specific, literally interpreted passage of Scripture, Hooker invoked the traditional idea that morality is intrinsic to human nature and apprehensible through reason:

Law rational therefore, which men commonly use to call the law of Nature, meaning thereby the Law which human Nature knoweth itself in reason universally bound unto, which also for that cause may be termed most fitly the Law of Reason; this Law, I say, comprehendeth all those things which men by the light of their natural understanding evidently know, or at leastwise may know, to be beseeming or unbeseeming, virtuous or vicious, good or evil for them to do.

(I.viii.9)

Hooker is elaborating the idea of moral absolutes emerging from the kind of creatures that human beings are in essence. This idea can be found in classical thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero as well as in the Bible when, for instance, Saint Paul maintains that even pagans, to whom the Law has not been revealed, show the work of the law written in their hearts (Rom 2:15, KJV).

Hooker’s most important source, however, may have been Saint Thomas Aquinas, who distinguishes between the great generality of created beings, which follow the law of their natures necessarily and without reflection, and a rational creature, who actually participates in the eternal reason, through which he has a natural inclination toward the fitting act and purpose. And such participation in the eternal law in a rational creature is called natural law.⁵ We should bear in mind that this traditional conception of law differs greatly in tone from its modern counterpart, as Danby explains: The law it [the Elizabethan community] observed was felt more as self-expression than as external restraint. It was a law, in any case, which the creature was most itself when it obeyed. And rebellion against this law was rebellion against one’s self, loss of all nature, lapse into chaos.⁶

Little more than fifty years later, Thomas Hobbes was proclaiming a contradictory vision of human nature and the human condition in which law was conceived as a set of arbitrarily imposed rules aimed at controlling unbridled human nature and saving men from the anarchy of their own desires. The natural state of humanity, he insists in Leviathan, is that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man (I.xiii.8-9). In this state of nature before the imposition of laws by a sovereign power, there is only continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.⁷ Moreover, Hobbes does not see human nature as essentially rational with a definite purpose or end:

For there is no such Finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor Summum Bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers. Nor can a man any more live, whose desires are at an end, than he whose senses and imaginations are at a stand. Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter.⁸

Although Hobbes is writing long after the first performances of King Lear, the ideas he so forcibly articulates were already in the air during Shakespeare’s lifetime. They are implicit in the amoral politics of Machiavelli; the French essayist Montaigne toys with such ideas; they are darkly expounded by Giordano Bruno; yet their influence in late Renaissance society is perhaps most visible in the numerous attacks by orthodox thinkers on what they perceived to be rampant atheism. Hobbes is simply the first to lay out in cold rationalistic prose the moral relativism associated with a thoroughly materialist view of human nature.

Shakespeare’s outstanding achievement is to have dramatized the consequences of this philosophy, nearly fifty years before Hobbes so clearly expounded it, in the characters and actions of representative human beings. Edmund, Goneril, and Regan—and in a cruder way, Cornwall—are embodiments of a materialist interpretation of humanity that substitutes for natural law a Renaissance naturalism, which in many ways anticipates by more than two centuries Darwin’s notion of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. Nevertheless, King Lear is neither an allegory nor a simple morality tale. Edmund, Goneril, and Regan are not mere personifications of vices like cruelty, ambition, and greed; and the philosophy that they in some sense embody was gaining adherents in Shakespeare’s day and could claim the approval of much enlightened opinion in the modern world. While it is true that by the end of the tragedy, these three have unleashed an orgy of betrayal, brutality, and murder, for at least the first two acts they can claim to have been intolerably provoked, and Lear’s two daughters even maintain a semblance of respectability. By the same token the good characters are not altogether or unambiguously good. The brave and faithful Kent perhaps shows excess pride in his pugnacious dealings with Oswald and certainly imprudence, harming his master’s cause more than he helps it. Kent even admits that he had more man than wit about him when he drew on Oswald (II.ii.40). Gloucester’s loyal son Edgar seems hopelessly obtuse at first, and then he seems to trifle with his father’s misery when he convinces him that he has miraculously survived a leap off the cliff at Dover. Looking down upon the illegitimate brother whom he has mortally wounded, he recalls their father:

     The gods are just and of our pleasant vices

     Make instruments to plague us:

     The dark and vicious place where thee he got

     Cost him his eyes.

(V.iii.168-71)

Some critics find nothing in this but harsh self-righteousness, but it may with equal reason be reckoned grim moral realism. Even Cordelia, who becomes a figure of luminous charity, may with some show of plausibility be faulted for obstinacy in the first scene: Why not swallow her pride, tell her aged father what he wishes to hear, and spare everyone the horrors that follow?

At the center of the drama is of course King Lear himself, whose tragedy has an analogue in the subplot involving the Earl of Gloucester and his sons. In the play’s opening scene, these two old men both behave selfishly and irresponsibly, completely oblivious to the effect of their words on their children and the other courtiers. Gloucester introduces his illegitimate son to Kent with a mixture of embarrassment and smirking pride in the sexual exploits of his youth. An evidently uncomfortable Kent handles the situation with delicate courtesy, but we can only guess the effect of this mortifying treatment on Edmund until his cynical disdain for his father and respectable society emerges at the beginning of the following scene. King Lear’s decision to divide up his kingdom between his three daughters and live among them as a king in name only would seem the height of imprudence to a Jacobean audience, his demand that his three daughters each earn their third of the realm by fulsome protestations of their love is plainly self-indulgent arrogance, and his disinheritance and banishment of Cordelia—and her defender Kent—for failing the love test manifests an unconscionable lack of self-control as well as deplorable wrath.

Lear and Gloucester have, in effect, taken their own privileged position in family and society for granted, while neglecting their obligation to maintain these naturally ordained hierarchies in their full integrity. After all, natural law entails the participation of the rational creature in the eternal reason; it is not, as Gloucester supposes, a magic formula by which the gods ensure the positions of the great by imposing constraints upon their inferiors. Both Lear and Gloucester have forgotten their responsibilities and failed to acknowledge that the actions of free, rational agents have consequences even in a providentially ordered universe. Neglect of their responsibilities and egotistical self-indulgence unleash a flood of horrors that neither man could have anticipated. Lear is by no means so wicked as his elder daughters, and Gloucester comes nowhere near the depravity of the bastard son who scorns him. Nevertheless, the heart-wrenching power of the tragedy comes precisely from the fact that unspeakable violence and cruelty are set loose by the vanity and petty vice of reasonably good men.

And Shakespeare is at pains to show that they both are good men. For all his adolescent smirking over a youthful sexual indiscretion and his obliviousness to the real nature of his sons, it is clear that Gloucester has acknowledged Edmund and sought to provide a decent, respectable life for him. More important, when the crisis comes, Gloucester proves a loyal and courageous subject to Lear and instinctively takes the side of justice—at a terrible personal cost. The case of King Lear himself is more complex, but not finally less decisive. To be sure, his conduct in the opening scene is simply unconscionable, and the audience is likely to take at face value Regan’s observation:  ‘Tis the infirmity of his age, yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself (I.i.294-95). In addition, there are Goneril’s complaints about the riotous behavior of his knights and her father’s own gross crime [. . .] / That sets us all at odds (I.iii.7, 5-6). Merely contemplating the housing, feeding, and entertaining a rather demanding aged parent and one-hundred of his armed followers will generate some sympathy for Goneril.

But of course we forget that these are royal households (reflecting Shakespeare’s own era rather than 800 B.C.), where huge retinues were the norm. Moreover, Shakespeare wisely refrains from actually showing us the bad behavior on the part of Lear and his knights, and anyone who has (foolishly!) attempted to mediate between an elderly parent living with a mature child with a family will recognize that there is no getting to the bottom of the complaints, recriminations, and hurt feelings. The single exception, of course, is Oswald’s roughing up at the hands of Kent, with Lear’s approval. It is essential, however, that we recognize that Oswald has offered the king an insufferable insult. When Lear demands that the Steward say who Lear is, the bland reply, My lady’s father (I.iv.77), may sound inoffensive to modern ears, but it effectively denies Lear his royal identity and any independent existence. Whatever the old king’s faults, it is Goneril who has deliberately provoked the confrontation: Put on what weary negligence you please, / You and your fellows; I’d have it come to question (I.iii.13-14). It would seem that Lear’s grave error is less his conduct in his daughter’s house than in making himself dependent upon her, so that he is vulnerable to slights from men such as Oswald.

In their conversation toward the close of the first scene, Goneril and Regan suggest that Lear has always been self-centered and irresponsible: The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash (I.i.296). We have, however, more reliable contrary evidence. First, there is the fact that Kent stands up and disputes the king’s foolhardy decision in the first scene in very vigorous terms; it is hard to imagine him doing so if Lear had never listened to reason in the past. And Cordelia’s refusal to profess her love in the fulsome terms of her sisters looks more like the response of someone who is surprised and dumbfounded than a calculated refusal to conform. Her aside, What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent (I.i.62), suggests that she had no idea what was coming, and that she expected her father to respond reasonably to her exposition of the bond of filial love. Even after he has been banished, Kent returns in disguise to serve Lear in spite of the king’s unjust sentence and tells his old master that he would serve because he finds in the king’s countenance something worth serving, Authority (I.iv.30). Kent is no fool, and it is hard to imagine him showing such loyalty to a man whom he thought to be a fool. His loyalty is seconded by Gloucester, Edgar, eventually Albany, and—above all—Cordelia, who knows her father to be a better man than he shows himself in the first scene. Finally, and most important, there is Lear’s moral growth in the course of his ordeal in the middle acts of the play: his recognition of the shortcomings of his reign in his neglect of the poor and in government corruption, his growing compassion, and his ability to humble himself and be reconciled with Cordelia.

A man who has thus grown morally and spiritually, a man who has truly called himself more sinned against that sinning (III.ii.60), a man who seems finally to have found the genuine love he craved in the first scene—King Lear dies with his beloved youngest daughter in his arms, in apparent despair, surrounded by the corpses of his enemies. Or is it despair? Lear’s final words seem to suggest that he has, mistakenly, seen breath on Cordelia’s lips and dies in joy believing that she lives: Do you see this? Look on her: look, her lips, /Look there, look there! (V.iii.309-10). Now a delusion would seem a frail basis on which to build a case that Lear dies hopeful and in some sense redeemed, and this consideration leads to the issue of in what sense King Lear is a Christian play. Its setting eight-hundred years before the birth of Christ is not really a relevant consideration. As early as 1589, the Privy Council had warned against the treatment of matters of Divinytie and of state on the stage, and by 1606 the Statue of Oaths sharply curtailed the utterance of words associated with religion in stage plays. Moreover, the performance of plays required a license from the Master of Revels, who could order anything he deemed offensive or even questionable removed.⁹ To set a play among ancient pagans provided a Jacobean dramatist with a prudent means of dealing with Christian themes by implication with less danger of censorship, and the wealth of scriptural language and allusion in King Lear makes it evident that Shakespeare expected his audience to interpret the work in Christian terms.

A multitude of Christian references does not, however, constitute a Christian play. It is possible to read the play as a titanic tragedy of existential despair, which finds nature either indifferent to human suffering or positively hostile—in league, as it were, with Edmund and the wicked sisters—and the gods absent or even more hostile. According to this view, Lear is transformed from a pious pagan into a defiant rebel against nature and divinity. He denies the reality of natural justice and authority: There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office (IV.vi.154-55); and the death of Cordelia leaves him raging against heaven and dying in delusion or despair:

     Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!

     Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so

     That heaven’s vault should crack: she’s gone for ever.

     I know when one is dead and when one lives;

     She’s dead as earth.

(V.3.255-59)

The Christian allusions in the play thus form an ironic comment on the pious illusions—now shattered—of the virtuous characters. The popular modern theory of Christian optimism is thus exploded,¹⁰ and the meaning of the play is summed up by the blinded, disillusioned Gloucester, as he wanders in search of the cliffs of Dover in order to cast himself down and take his own life: As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, / They kill us for their sport (IV.i.38-39).

Such a reading manifests a certain plausibility from a modern secularist perspective, but it rests on a faulty understanding of Christianity. Neither the New Testament nor traditional Christian orthodoxy expounds a religion of optimism. In the face of worldly optimism—the expectation that good men and women with good intentions will be rewarded in this life—Christianity offers hope, the conviction that amidst all the terror and misery wrought by sin human destiny is still controlled by divine Providence: For we are saved by hope. But hope that is seen is not hope. For what a man seeth, why doth he hope for? But if we hope for that which we see not, we wait for it with patience (Rom 8:24-25). The nihilistic reading of King Lear gains a good deal of traction from the contrast between Shakespeare’s play and the anonymous True Chronicle Historie of King Leir and his three daughters,¹¹ which ends with the king and his daughter Cordella reconciled and safely restored to happiness, and which treats the ostensibly pagan setting as if it were fully Christian. Shakespeare’s elimination of the explicitly Christian assumptions of the old play, so the argument goes, his treatment of the characters as pre-Christian pagans, and—above all—his conversion of the happy ending into a tragic catastrophe must indicate that he is rejecting the Christian vision in favor of something very like the modern existentialist view that regards man as a fortuitous alien being in an absurd cosmos.

It is, to be sure, evident that Shakespeare radically alters the version of the story in the chronicle play, but it makes at least as much sense to infer that he is rejecting not Christianity, but rather a shallow, sentimental conception of Christianity as a gospel of earthly comfort and prosperity. His treatment of the other sources reinforces this view. The Lear story was first introduced into England by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Anglicana in the twelfth century and recounted numerous times in sixteenth-century histories and poems. The story is told, for example, in Raphael Holinshed’s Historie of England (1587), the most important source for Shakespeare’s English history plays, in The Mirror for Magistrates (1574), and in the second book of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590, 1596). In all of these prominent sources, after a successful effort to restore her father, the Cordelia figure is again defeated and cast into prison, where she commits suicide, usually by hanging herself. A playwright who wished to suggest that the universe is a meaningless chaos affording no basis for human hope or value would have no reason to change this traditional conclusion. How better to emphasize the indifference of the gods than to allow the character who most persistently evokes Christian overtones to take her own life in despair—a mortal sin? After all, Shakespeare is content to follow Plutarch and other classical sources in depicting the suicides of Roman tragic figures, Brutus and Cassius and Antony and Cleopatra.

Disapproval of suicide, however, is a recurrent motif in Shakespearean drama. Hamlet broods on self-slaughter more than once, but rejects it for himself and expends his final dying breath in forestalling the impulse in Horatio. Even the elvish trickster Puck improbably condemns suicide in a remark that seems utterly gratuitous in the plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (III.ii.382-87). This preoccupation also provides an understanding of Edgar’s elaborate ruse to wean his father away from suicidal intentions and his continual concern lest the old man again be thus tempted. If Gloucester’s bitter condemnation of the gods—they kill us for their sport—were true, then suicide would be an unexceptionable choice. Edgar answers this complaint reasonably by insisting that the gods are just: as dreadful as his father’s suffering is, its ultimate cause is his own sin and folly. Edgar provides a far more profound rejoinder, however, when his father, having learned of the defeat of Cordelia’s forces, wishes to give up and wait to be taken and slain by his enemies: What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure / Their going hence even as their coming hither. / Ripeness is all (V.ii.9-11). This assertion that we are not autonomous agents, but rather subjects of a higher power, is not a passing fancy of Shakespeare’s; it echoes a similar observation by Hamlet, stressing the force of Providence: There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all (V.ii.219-23).

Of course the most striking evidence of the play’s Christian overtones is the luminous figure of Cordelia. Throughout the tragedy she is associated in general terms with Christian ideas and attitudes and not infrequently with Christ himself. When her father has cast her off, the king of France, enraptured by her virtue, describes her in paradoxical terms that call to mind the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount: Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor, / Most choice forsaken and most loved despised (I.i.252-53). When she invades England with her husband’s French army, she justifies her action by claiming, O dear father, / It is thy business that I go about (IV.iv.23-24), echoing the twelve-year-old Jesus’ words when Mary and Joseph find him disputing with the rabbis in the temple; and a nameless gentleman says to a raving Lear, Thou hast one daughter / Who redeems nature from the general curse / Which twain have brought her to (IV.vi.201-3).The pagan character is undoubtedly thinking of Goneril and Regan, but a Christian audience will see an allusion to Adam and Eve, whose sin will be redeemed by the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. Hence when Lear emerges at the very end of the play’s last scene with the body of Cordelia in his arms and sinks to his knees, we are confronted with a powerful, reversed image of the Pietà—a father with his dead daughter in his arms, rather than a mother with her son. Most important, however, is the reconciliation scene, when Lear humbled with remorse says to Cordelia,

     If you have poison for me, I will drink it.

     I know you do not love me, for your sisters

     Have, as I do remember, done me

Reviews for King Lear

[therebelprince · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very enjoyable edition. Unlike most of the Arden editions, Foakes comes across more as an educator than an academic-among-friends. This does mean occasionally that he'll cover ground most professional-level readers already understand, but it makes this a really well-rounded introduction to the play.

The decision here is to incorporate both Quarto and Folio texts in one, with the differences clearly delineated. It's probably the best possible option for this play, and well done.

[thornton37814 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This full-cast audio recording tells the story of King Lear who unwisely divided his inheritance based on his perception of how much each daughter loved him. We see how this leads to a life of isolation and great tragedy within his own family. Some actors were more skilled in their role interpretations than others.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read (listened) to this after reading A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. I enjoyed both very much.

[tobinelliott · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

While there's a lot to love here...the actual writing is a standout...overall, this one didn't click with me as much as some of the others did.

Probably me and my personal weirdness, but I despised Goneril and Regan as soon as they opened their mouths (which was likely the point with their awful, fawning fake devotion), but I also took an instant dislike to Lear himself. How does a king manage to rule so well, yet make two stupid decisions in the span of minutes? Who asks their children to essentially fall all over themselves to prove their adoration for their own father? Who is so insecure as to demand that of their children?

And, when the first two play this terrible game, and the third one takes the more measured approach, choosing honestly over hyperbole, he punishes her?

And then, wonder of wonders, he later finds out those first two were bullshitting him, and he's shocked?

All of this kept spinning through my mind through the rest of the play. I suppose, had I been able to get past that initial plot device, I would have bought in hook, line, and sinker to this one because, as I said, there's a lot to love.

But I just couldn't get past that opening.

[anniemod · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Edition: Arkangel ShakespeareKing Lear had been one of my favorite Shakespeare dramas ever since I read it for the first time in my early teens in Bulgarian (I read it a few years later in English as well) Back then I never realized that there is a problem with its texts - for all intents and purposes, there are two separate King Lear plays - while most of the plays suffer from this, Kind Lear has the largest differences (or one of the largest) between its Quatro1 and Folio texts (in addition to the inevitable changes and rewrites the Q has 285 lines that the F does not have and F has 115 completely new lines). And they are not just fillers - there are crucial differences between the two - including the end (oh, Lear dies - that does not change but what he believes when he dies is a different story). Each editor picks up their own way through the two texts although a conflated text had become the norm -- but that conflation can be very different between editions. But let's talk about the play itself: Shakespeare takes a existing story from various sources (including Holinshed's Chronicles) and gives it a new life - and a new ending. The king of Britain is getting old and has no sons so he decides to split the kingdom between his three daughters: Goneril, Regan and Cordelia - nothing unusual in this and for anyone in 1606 that would have sounded absolutely correct - primogeniture had been the law of the land and when there is no son, the daughters are equal heiresses under the law. Except that Lear decides to test his daughters and asks them how much they love him - and as his youngest, Cordelia, refuses to pay lip service to him, she is disinherited and leaves with her new husband for France. Except that as usual, lip service and real attachment are different things and as soon as they get the power, the two older daughters try to take away everything else from Lear - who is not very happy about that and flees. But the play is not just the story of one family - it is the story of two of them - Gloucester and his sons (the legitimate Edgar and the illegitimate Edmund) and the dynamic between them is parallel to the dissolving of Lear's family. The two sons of Gloucester and the 3 daughters of Lear exist in parallel but scarily similar lines. Evil and choices become important for the downfalls of both men - the betrayals always having their own blood. But so do the redeemers. And that's where the story of the two men diverge - Gloucester gets his son back early on (even if he does not know it), Lear needs to wait a lot longer. Both learn about their mistakes before they die and both try to make up for them but at the end just one of the children will be still standing. I used to think of King Lear as the play where everyone dies. Not that this does not happen in other Shakespeare dramas but here the number of the survivors at the end is extremely low, even for Shakespeare and a lot lower than it is in the sources of this play. The double end I was talking about earlier comes almost at the end - when Lear dies. In one version he is the cause for Cordelia's death, he knows and he knows that he had not managed to save her; in the other he dies before the final confirmation that she is dead, just when he thinks he sees her moving. One of the ends hints at redemption (Lear is the one who saves her even if he is also the reason for her being killed to start it), the other one is eternal damnation. While this may mean like not much of a difference now, the 17th century drama goer would have considered that a huge difference. The rest of the differences between the versions of the play are less impactful (even though some well known scenes such as the fake trial of the daughters is nowhere to be seen in the later versions). And then there is of course the Victorian version of the play that decided that the play is too dark so gave it a happy end... The two older sisters and Edmund are evil personified - and in the case of the sisters, it has no explanation. The sources do - so one wonders if Shakespeare had relied on people knowing the story so decided not to add the scenes needed to explain it. And at the same time some of the positive characters (Kent, Edgar and even the Fool (who is the moral compass of the story for the first part of it... and then disappears altogether)) are almost one-tone as well - too good to be true. But then... it is a play, what more can you do in such a short time. The play works -- especially because being good or bad does not spell your end - you are as likely to have a "he dies" queue regardless of where you are on the good/bad scale...Almost 3 centuries later, a novel will begin with a now well known sentence: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". King Lear makes me think about that exact sentiment. The Arkangel Shakespeare version of the play uses the Pelican text of the play (the one from the now older edition - they are reissuing again and I am not sure how much the current text is changed compared to the old one). It is a conflated text so most of the missing scenes are added and the end is the one with hope - Lear thinks that Cordelia may be alive. It is a masterful performance led by Trevor Peacock and with a host of other known actors including David Tennant as Edgar, Samantha Bond as Regan and Clive Merrison as Gloucester. If you had never listened to the play before, this is a good version although if you do not know the play, it can get a bit confusing - too many characters with somewhat intersecting goals can lead to confusion.And if you are going to listen and read along, picking up the correct version of the printed play is crucial, especially in this play - or you may get a bit lost.

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An intriguing play aptly portrayed by the cast, working with an excellent script.

[angelarenea-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A fairly quick read. I didn't love it as much as I remember. Lear was way obsessed with 'nature' and the whole thing was so pompous. But not as bad as some of his other stuff.

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The division of the Kingdom begins the play with first, the Earls of Kent and Gloucester speculating on the basis for the division and second, the actual division by Lear based on professions of love requested from his three daughters. When this event goes not as planned the action of the play ensues and the reader is in for a wild ride, much as Lear himself.The play provides one of Shakespeare's most thoroughly evil characters in Edmund while much of the rest of the cast is aligned against each other with Lear the outcast suffering along with the Earl of Gloucester who is tricked by his bastard son Edmund into believing that his other son Edgar is plotting against him. While there are some lighter moments the play is generally very dark filled with the bitter results of Lear's poor decisions at the outset. Interestingly we do not get much of a back story and find, other than his age of four score years, little else to suggest why Lear would surrender his power and his Kingdom at the outset. The play is certainly powerful and maintains your interest through dramatic scenes, while it also provides for many questions - some of which remain unanswered.

[deckla_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The illustrations are unremarkable.

[meditationesmartini · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is especially devastating because (sorry, Aristotle's Poetics, but indeed because) it departs from the conventions of good Greek tragedy. Nobody's led astray slickly by their tragic flaw;* Lear's ennobled by suffering perhaps but at the start he's no philosopher king (as I'd envisioned) but a belching, beer can crushing Dark Ages thug lord who definitely brings it on himself, but not in any exquisite "his virtue was his fall" way. Cordelia is, not an ungrateful, but an ungracious child whose tongue is a fat slab of ham and who can't even manage the basic level of social graces to not spark a family feud that leaves everyone killed (surely a low bar!!). Goneril and Regan are straight-up venial malice, Shakespeare's Pardoner and Summoner; Edmund, obviously, charismatic, but a baaaad man; and the default good guys, the ones with the chance to win the day and transform this blood-filled torture show into two hours' pleasing traffic of the stage, obviously fumble it bigly (Albany, unbrave and too subtle; Kent, brave and too unsubtle; Gloucester, a spineless joke; and what is Edgar doing out in that wilderness when he should be teaming up with Cordelia and Kent to plan an invasion that's a MacArthuresque comeback and not a disaster, to go down as the plucky band of good friends who renewed the social compact with their steel and founded a second Camelot, a new England). They're not all monsters, and there are frequent glimmers of greatness, but they fuck it all up; in other words, they're us.And then Lear's madness has much too much of, like, an MRA drum circle meeting, with the Fool and Kent and Edgar/John o'Bedlam (that's a name, that) farting around the wastes going "Fuckin' bitches, can't live with em, can't smack em one like they deserve" (though of course this is a Shakespearean tragedy, so everyone pretty much gonna get smacked one sooner or later). Not tragic flaws, in other words, but just flaws, with only glimmers of the good, and all the more devastating for that because all the more real. It's haaard to keep it together for a whole lifetime and not degenerate into a sad caricature of you at your best, or you as you could have been, and I wonder how many families start out full of love and functional relations and wind up kind of hating each other in a low key way just because of the accretion of mental abrasions plus the occasional big wound and because life is long.This seems like a family that just got tired of not hating each other, standing in for a social order that's gotten tired of basically working from day to day, and everyone's just itching to flip the table and ruin Thanksgiving. I have little faith, post-play, that Edgar or Albany in charge will salvage the day--historically, of course, their analogues did not--and it's gonna be a long hard road to a fresh start (we don't of course try to find one such in the actual history--I mean, 1066?--pretty sure fresh starts don't happen in actual history--but I trust the general point is clear). This seems like the most plausible/least arbitrary of Shakespeare's tragedies, I am saying here, and thus also the most desolate, and one with lessons for any family (cf., say, Hamlet, with its very important lessons for families where the mother kills the dad and marries his brother and the dad's ghost comes back to tell the son to kill his uncle, a niche market to say the least), and one that I'll revisit again and again.*Side note, my friend Dan calls me "My favourite Hamartian," and I'm recording that here because we may grow apart and I may forget that but I never want to forget really and so, hope to find it here once more

[composingcomposer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There are three main reasons for the disorder already occurring by the end of Act I. The first and most obvious is Lear's madness. He certain seems to be loosing it a bit, and his crazed banishment of Cordelia and Kent couldn't possibly have done anything but harm to him. The second reason is Cordelia's sister's treachery. It could be argued that they appear to be trying to protect him and their people by taking away his knights, he is crazy after all, if it weren't for Cordelia's parting words to them; "I know you what you are;/And, like a sister, am most loth to call/Your faults as they are nam'd. Love well our father:/To your professed bosoms I commit him:/But yet, alas, stood I within his grace, I would prefer him to a better place." And a few lines later; "Time shall unfold what plighted cunning/Who cover faults, at last shame them derides." These lines seem to indicate that Cordelia knows that Goneril and Regan are not only flattering Lear for gain, but also that they hold him in contempt, and will likely do him harm, and revealing the second harbinger of disorder.

The third indicator of the chaos to come is Edmund. I feel bad for him, for the contempt others hold him in because of the doings of his parents, but he quickly does what he can to dispel my pity for him with his evil attitudes as he works to turn his father and brother against one another. I find it ironic that he distains his father's belief in fate through astrology, yet confesses that because of when he was born he was supposed to be 'rough and lecherous,' yet doesn't believe himself to have those traits he was just showing.

Shakespeare's purpose in showing this disorder seems to come from the idea of dividing his kingdom. A divided kingdom would often lead to civil war and chaos, so Lear's deliberate dividing of the kingdom would probably have been viewed as deliberately inviting disorder.

Power in England was structured in a pyramid. The king on top, and wealth and power went to a few nobles who had all the money. Lear was trying to disrupt that structure in a way that would have alarmed the people watching the play. Cordelia took a great risk in not bowing to her father's wishes, as his denying her dowry could have driven away both her suitors, leaving her alone and destitute in a world that didn't favor lone women. In her case, however Cordelia's suitor from France still marries her, which would be very unusual since she had no dowry, and she wouldn't gain him an alliance with England.

Family dynamics can change depending on the health of a person, as others may come into their lives and as children grow up. Cordelia was Lear's favorite child, yet when she would not lie to him with flattery, he cast her off. Why? Did he not realize that her impending marriage would change is relationship with her? She would still love him, of course, but even with the play being in pre-Christian era, the belief would probably have been that the wife's foremost alliegence should be to her husband, and Lear should have understood this. In fact, it seems strange that he would have even questioned this part of the structure of society at all.

No one has a perfect family. This is shown in Edgar and Edmund's family. Gloster (or Gloucester as some versions call him) may have been unfaithful to his wife, it's never stated whether she was alive at the time of Edmund's conception. If Gloster was unfaithful to his wife than he was dishonest and breaking one of the oldest understandings of marriage. If Edgar's mother had already died, that Gloster was not responsible enough to remarry, and to marry Edmund's mother, or at least admit himself Edmund's father when the boy was a child, instead of waiting until Edmund was old enough to distinguish himself, and in doing so, add to Gloster's reputation. It seems very unfair that Edmund, and almost any other illigitmate child born until the the late 1900s should be punished for something that their parents did. Yet neither should Edmund take out his misfortunes on his brother, who was, in all probability, guiltless in tormenting him. After all, Edgar trusts Edmund completely, which does not seem like an attitude he would hold had he tormented Edmund before. I think that Gloster could have stopped his fate had he treated Edmund with kindness from the beginning of his life, rather than waiting until Edmund could add to his reputation to acknowledge him.

I don't actually seem him mocking Edmund, so much as simply being ashamed of his illegitimacy because it was Gloster's own act that was the cause of Edmund's bastardy. As Gloster was speaking to Kent, he was very frank about the manner of Edmund's conception, to the point that we would say he was being rude to Edmund, but really, for the time, the fact that he had acknowledged Edmund as his son at all was better than many bastards would have gotten. For this reason I think that more than anything it was the fact that he took so long to acknowledge Edmund, that led to Edmund's bitterness and Gloster's downfall.

(This review is patched up from posts I made on an online Shakespeare class)

[seriousgrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

To sum up the play in one sentence: this is the story of a king seeking to divide his kingdom among his three daughters based on who could articulate her love for him the best. Beyond that it is the tragedy of emotional greed - of wanting to be loved at any cost. It is the tragedy of politics and family dynamics. Youngest daughter Cordelia is unwilling to conform to her father's wishes of exaggerated devotion. Isn't the last born always the rebel in the family? As a result Cordelia's portion of the kingdom is divided among her two sisters, Goneril and Regan. The story goes on to ooze betrayal and madness. Lear is trapped by his own ego and made foolish by his hubris.

[cbl_tn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

King Lear makes a fateful decision to divide his kingdom between his three daughters. The reaction of one daughter, Cordelia, displeases the king so much that he cuts her out of any inheritance. The kingdom will be divided between the other two daughters, Goneril and Regan. His plan is that they will take care of him in his old age. They soon decide that they don't want to use their inheritance to support their father, and the king finds himself with nowhere to shelter in a violent storm. Meanwhile, the Earl of Gloucester's illegitimate son plots to usurp his legitimate brother's place as their father's heir. As in many of Shakespeare's plays, there are characters in disguise. It's filled with violence and cruelty without comic relief like the gravedigger scene in Hamlet. The family conflict at its heart will continue to resonate with audiences and readers as long as there are families.

[jbd1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of my favorite Shakespeare plays, though it had been a long time since I read it. Didn't disappoint on a reread!

[jhudsui_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This did not quite top Hamlet as my favorite Shakespeare play but it is way up there. With the exception of the black and white hatted Gloucester boys there is a lot more moral complexity and ambiguity than you normally see in Shakespeare play; it wasn't until well into the play that I had any idea who I was supposed to sympathize with between the king and the daughters and that suspense actually adding a great deal to my interest while reading. Edgar's antic disposition is a lot more interesting and entertaining to me than Hamlet's but he doesn't have anything like Hamlet's soliloquies.

[jscape2000 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The version of Lear I saw in 2012 too closely matched the texted: too many story lines, too many gag scenes, and too much talking about how hard it is to be king. The tragedy of Lear is that he gets exactly what he deserved. For me, it lacks much of the intrigue of Macbeth or the poetry of Hamlet or Othello.

[rbeene-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Shakespeare but I have not read it in a long time and I do not think that I have ever seen it.

[mstrust · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Vain and silly King Lear demands that each of his three daughters describe their love for him. When the youngest and favored Cordelia gives a reply that is less gushing, but more reasonable, than her sisters, the King banishes her. This sets up a chain of miserable events in which the sisters and their husbands scramble to replace Cordelia in their father's heart, but fail because ambition brings out their cruelty.

[aliceanna-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Probably the best of Shakespeare's works thematically, but not the easiest to follow. The sub-plots, the various intrigues, makes for a very convoluted plot. Some great roles though -- Lear, Edgar playing a madman, the Fool, the evil Edmund and the scheming daughters ... some serious scene-stealing material.

[rosenstern · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of my favorite Shakespeare plays. King Lear asks his daughters who truly loves him, and the oldest two spin golden words of flattery while the third one cannot do so. Lear abandons his third daughter and this opens the story to the madness that follows. Brilliantly imagined characters and psyches. Worth it

[jmcgarry2011 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent work. I saw this performed at the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona, MN. Very powerful performance. I liked this edition in particular because it explained the nuances of the language right next to the original text. That plus the performance made this easier to understand.

[neurodrew · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

King LearWilliam ShakespeareThursday, March 27, 2014 In my Shakespeare class, senior year of college, the professor thought this was the play central to understanding Shakespeare. The tale is familiar; Lear gives up his Kingdom to avoid the cares of ruling, dividing it among his daughters. Cordelia, the most honest, points out that she owes him a duty but also owes her fiancé, the King of France, love and affection. Lear casts her out, because she is not as effusive as her sisters, Regan and Goneril. Goneril, hosts the King first, instructs her servants to ignore his knights, and when he goes to Regan, she sends a letter to ensure he is cast out there as well. Lear goes mad in a storm, succored by Kent, a loyal knight whose advice was unwelcome in the initial scene, and by Edgar, the son of the Earl of Gloucester, who has been usurped by the machinations of Edmund, a bastard son, and who is the lover of Regan and Goneril. Cordelia brings an army to rescue Lear, but is defeated, and in the schemes of Edmund is killed in captivity. Regan dies, poisoned by Goneril jealous of Edmund, Goneril dies by suicide after Edmund is killed by Edgar, Gloucester dies after a blinding, and Lear dies of heart attack. Lear's speeches while mad are the essence of the mature understanding of the human situation "Striving to better, oft' we mar what's well""Let me kiss your hand!" Lear, in response "Let me wipe it first, it smells of mortality"Leather bound, Franklin Library, Tragedies of Shakespeare ($34.60 4/28/2012)

[bradgers-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When people want to rank Shakespeare's plays, usually Hamlet comes out as number one. This, in my experience, is the only other of his plays that I have seen mentioned as his greatest. If I were to rank his plays solely based upon their impact upon the world, I would probably agree with the usual placement of Hamlet as number one. However, were I to rank them based upon their impact on me, Lear gets the nod. Lear accurately and horrifyingly portrays the primal nature of man like few other works of literature; the only other to come to my mind is Lord of the Flies. Yet it's more than that; Lord of the Flies can afford to ignore the effects of sexual attraction and familial ties upon our nature, but Lear (the work, not the character) meets these head-on and uses them to devastating effect. This play alone would guarantee Shakespeare a place as one of the greatest English authors. With the rest of his body of work, there's no question that he is the greatest.

[ron_peters-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I enjoy the Folger editions of Shakespeare - to each his own in this matter. Some find Lear to be overblown, I am tremendously moved by it, and haunted by the image of the old man howling across the barren heaths with his dead daughter in his arms. 'I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead.' Lear 4.7.52-54

[leslie398 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Thoughts on the play: -A classic tragedy in which almost everyone dies at the end. -I really didn't have much sympathy for Lear. He acted incredibly foolishly, not just once in turning his back on Cordelia, but many times. -At first, Goneral seemed to be acting reasonably. If Lear had restrained his knights, much of the tragedy would have been lessened. (This was one of the foolish actions of Lear's I mentioned above.) However, as the plot moves on, she is revealed as being more and more terrible. -Edmund struck me as the villain, and he also acted as a catalyst for villainy. So I found the scene at near the end after he & Edgar had dueled a bit hard to believe - after everything, Edgar just forgives him!?! -I was shocked when Cornwall plucks out Gloucester's eyes. I didn't know that was going to happen! Gloucester struck me as the true tragic hero, rather than Lear. Both of them cast off deserving children, but Gloucester realized his error and suffered for it. It wasn't clear to me that Lear recognized his own faults the way Gloucester did.

[alanwpowers · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Maybe the fifteenth time I've read Lear (this time in the tiny red-leather RSC edition). Always impressed, especially with the curses and curse-like screeds. I can't stand Lear onstage, particularly the blinding of Gloster (so spelled in this edition). How sharper than a serpants teeth it is / to have a thankless child--though having a thankless parent like Lear, Act I Sc I, ain't so great either. I do love the Russian film Lear with music by Shostakovich, and the King's grand route through his bestiary of hawks and eagles.I suppose this is Shakespeare's great (that's redundant, since "Sh" is mostly "great") assessment of homelessness. The undeservingly roofless. it is also his only play on retirement, which he recommends against. Or perhaps Lear should have had a condo in Florida? Of course, his hundred knights, a problem for the condominium board, as it was for his daughters. And Shakespeare, who says in a sonnet he was "lame by fortune's despite" also addresses the handicapped here, recommending tripping blind persons to cheer them up.Of course, Lear has his personal Letterman-Colbert, the Fool, so he doesn't need a TV in the electrical storm on the heath. That's fortunate, because it would have been dangerous to turn on a TV with all that lightening. The play seems also to recommend serious disguises like Kent's dialects and Edgar's mud. Next time I go to a party I'll think about some mud, which reduces Edgar's likelihood of being killed by his former friends.And finally, the play touches on senility, where Lear cannot be sure at first Cordelia is his daughter.I'm not sure, but the author may be recommending senility as a palliative to tragedy--and to aging. A friend of mine once put it, "Who's to say the senile's not having the time of his life?"

[karl6steel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Teaching it for the second time. The Folger edition is okay, but it badly needs to be updated; and the illustrations in the facing page are, to my mind, badly chosen, unless they're meant only to promote the grandeur of the Folger library. I think they would have done much better to provide photos of scenes taken from various productions/films/adaptations of Lear; no doubt the students would pay more attention to such things, to say nothing of nonexpert instructors like me.

Oh, the play: certainly very good at cutting the legs out from under the notion that suffering can be redemptive. Lear discovers compassion and love, Gloucester grows up, but what do they get? Death. And what are we left with? The two appalling milquetoast prigs, Albany and Edgar,* perhaps the two characters in Lear who understand least well what the whole thing is about. At least Kent has the grace to go off and wait to die.

* Hilarious: I just googled these names and the second hit is some plagiarism mill that's selling an essay that reads "Albany and Edgar both possess honest and kind characters." You have got to be kidding me! Please, please, please let someone try to get this paper past me. How stupid or desperate would someone have to be to pay for a paper that's, at best, a B-?

[alcracka · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

My absolute favorite Shakespeare play. Extra love for the fact that this came up when I searched for Stephen King.

[kant1066 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I don’t really know what to say about King Lear, or anything by Shakespeare, really. A summary would be redundant and out of place. So would gushing about the stunning beauty of the poetry, or how this is some of the greatest writing in the history of the English language, or any language.Only one thing comes to mind when I think of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Think what you will of Harold Bloom (and there are certainly many opinions about him), I always think, more than anything else, of the title of his book of essays on the plays: “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.” Is the title a typically hyperbolic publishing stunt? The more I read and re-read the plays, the less I’m starting to think so. Words simply fail me. They really do. The wonderful things about Modern Library/RSC edition are the introduction, critically informed notes on the text, folio notes, and a sizeable section on historically important performances of “King Lear.” These do a superb job of contextualizing the play, especially in how it performed on stage.

[albertogiuseppe · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Where is the 6th star, or even up to the 101st? Most likely the best English language play ever written, with one of the most phenomenal characters ever created. Hundreds of years before neural imaging began (like, last Tuesday,) to reveal the importance of intrinsic and extrinsic networks on behavior, the different tendencies between men and women and between man and man, the pyramidical, male-dominated social structures our species has tended to create over the last 10,000 years or so, Shakespeare intuited so, so much. From the start, where nothing will come from nothing, (a pun on 'noting' or social mores which, perhaps, the Bard intended in a more comprehensive way,) to Lear's failed, heartbreaking attempt to return to and save something greater than himself, it's a devastating, crystal clear work. We should use our tongues and eyes to crack heaven's gate, but we don't. A lifetime of careful observation, a brilliant mind, and a one-in-a-billion talent for prosody concentrated into a few hours.