King Lear
King Lear gives away his kingdom to his two evil daughters and their husbands and banishes his good daughter Cordelia and his friend Kent. After this obvious show of intelligence (yes, that was sarcasm) his downfall begins, and his jester rubs it in. The evil son-in-law disrespects Lear and is killed. The good son-in-law does very little, and his wife (one of the evil daughters) could not more obviously be flirting with the last evil character, Edmund, who is in the process of destroying his brother and father. In the end order is restored amid a huge pile of bodies, and the jester mysteriously dissapears.
The dissapearance of the jester bothers me, but that's just my compulsive sense of order. This play is breathtaking. It reminds us of what every five-year-old knows-life is not fair. There's not a whole lot that I can specifically say about the play. It comes, as an English teacher told me, out of the primeval muck of human nature, and I think that teacher was right. It feels primeval, instinctive. Think of Stonehenge and cave paintings. Not cave paintings, but you get the idea.
This can be quite depressing and gruesome-not exactly bedtime reading. But if you can get through it without suicide it's well worth it. By the way, the Fool's comment about being before the time of Merlin is true. Though there was almost certainly no real Merlin, there may have been a King Arthur, and if there was then he probably lived around 400 B.C. According to the legend which King Lear is drawn from, Lear lived around 3100 by the Jewish calender. Since it's now in the 5750s by the Jewish calender, King Lear would have ruled around 600 B.C., two hundred years before Arthur. Actually, I think Merlin was supposed to be pretty old already when he met Arthur, but the arthurian period is his main time of glory, so that's probably what Shakespeare was talking about anyway. That's one smart jester.
back to King Lear
main / shakespeare / people / movies / books / random / jokes / star trek / x-files
writing / quotes / poetry