King Lear

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?" ( )

I think this was the darkest, and most disturbing of the three Shakespearian tragedies I have read this semester! Although both Titus and Othello also have a lot of violence and darkness, King Lear has two elaborate plots, two families that are being thorn up from the inside, and fathers who suddenly appear to not know their children, and start judging their children in a different way than before.

The turmoil this creates, and the utter darkness that follows is almost painful, and the whole story unfolds with excrutiating details of violence towards two old, fragile men.

( )

Spoiler I suppose...

Well, I expected to hate it...being one of the tragedies, I didn't. I actually really loved it. (Thank you Comrade D!)Other than Cordelia, I was comletely fine with everyone who died. I did have to laugh that there were only three main characters alive at the end though!

I found one aspect rather annoyingly unrealistic, the fact that Lear seemed to be homeless without the favor of at least one of his two elder daughters. Kings have many a castle...you would think that he would have one to go to, even if he couldn't go to one of the two his daughers inhabited. I suppose it would have killed the plot otherwise, but it was a bit silly in any case. Setting that aside, it was exciting and interesting and I found myself not wanting to put it down...wanting to see what happened. ( )