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| Hearsay: |
Lear is my favourite Shakespeare for quite a few reasons, but here it’s considered from a base assumption that it sucks royally, so to speak. I include the teaser paragraph because you should know that there are still papers left in the world that run stories and series like this one at the LA Times (if you’re Canadian, you might not know that news papers aren’t just column after column of blowhard pop culture opinion and rampant political editorializing).
With this piece, we introduce a series of occasional articles in which contemporary writers look back at classic works of literature. Here, Jack Lynch, the author of “Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife That Turned a Provincial Playwright Into the Bard” revisits “King Lear,” which continues its run this week at UCLA with Ian McKellen in the title role.
It’s not an easy play to like. The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray found “King Lear” a “bore” when he saw it in 1847. “It is almost blasphemy to say a play of Shakespeare is bad,” he admitted, but “I can’t help it if I think so.” Since “Lear” first appeared around 1605, many have made similar accusations.
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October 26th, 2007 at 8:46 am
George, the link takes me to Bookninja’s Wordpress admin log-in
October 26th, 2007 at 8:55 am
Doh [fixed]
October 26th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Thanks!
October 26th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
“If “King Lear” is a difficult play to like, though, it’s a much harder play to hate”
Not true. I despise Lear. I’ve read it, I don’t know, eight, ten times, and studied it in five different classes. Every single reading of it was torture. I’ve read about half of Shakespeare’s plays over the last ten years or so, and Lear remains the only one I dislike.
October 26th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
‘A servant offers assistance, but…’
No but. That servant part is one of the great parts in there:
First Servant
Hold your hand, my lord:
I have served you ever since I was a child;
But better service have I never done you
Than now to bid you hold.
REGAN
How now, you dog!
First Servant
If you did wear a beard upon your chin,
I’d shake it on this quarrel. What do you mean?
CORNWALL
My villain!
They draw and fight
First Servant
Nay, then, come on, and take the chance of anger.
REGAN
Give me thy sword. A peasant stand up thus!
Takes a sword, and runs at him behind
First Servant
O, I am slain! My lord, you have one eye left
To see some mischief on him. O!
Dies
October 27th, 2007 at 5:54 am
If the topic is of interest I heartily reccomend Orwell’s “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool”, in which he brilliantly deconstructs Tolstoy’s loathing for the play. Orwell’s basic idea: that Tolstoy was Lear and that the drama cut a little to close to home. Indeed, the similarities, as he lays them out, are simultaneously fascinating, sad and funny. Well worth a read.