Thursday, February 7, 2019
King Lear :: essays research papers
mogul Lear is widely regarded as Shakespeares crowning artistic achievement. The scenes in which a mad Lear rages naked on a stormy heathland against his deceitful little girls and nature itself are considered by many scholars to be the finest pillow slip of tragic lyricism in the English language. Shakespeare took his main plot pains of an aged monarch abused by his children from a folk write up that appeared first in written form in the 12th coke and was based on spoken stories that originated much further into the Middle Ages. In several written versions of "Lear," the king does not go mad, his "good" daughter does not die, and the tale has a happy ending.This is not the case with Shakespeares Lear, a tragedy of such consuming force that audiences and readers are left to approve whether there is any meaning to the physical and moral carnage with which King Lear concludes. Like the noble Kent, seeing a mad, pathetic Lear with the murdered Cordelia in his arm s, the profound brutality of the tale compels us to wonder, "Is this the promised end?" (V.iii.264). That very skepticism stands at the divide between traditional critics of King Lear who find a heroic pattern in the story and modern readers who see no redeeming or purgative dimension to the play at all, the pith being the bare futility of the human condition with Lear as Everyman. As in Macbeth terror reaches its utmost height, in King Lear the sense of compassion is exhausted. The nous characters here are not those who act, but those who suffer. We have not in this, as in most tragedies, the picture of a calamity in which the sudden blows of fate seem still to honor the head which they strike, and where the acquittance is always accompanied by some flattering consolation in the memory of the former possession but a fall from the highest prime into the deepest abyss of misery, where humanity is stripped of all external and internal advantages, and minded(p) up a prey to naked helplessness.The threefold dignity of a king, an old man, and a father, is dishonored by the cruel ingratitude of his stirred daughters the old king, who out of a foolish tenderness has given onward everything, is driven out into the world a homeless beggar the childlike imbecility to which he was fast advancing changes into the wildest insanity, and when he is rescued from the distress to which he was abandoned, it is too late.
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