Daniel Chaikin's Reviews > King Lear

My first time reading Lear, and like all the other plays I've read this year I just assumed I would steam through it, getting the gist and some sense of the pace, and language and humor...you know, just enjoying it. Lear is not friendly this approach. It's long, worded for effect and meter, which means the sentences are complex and difficult follow; and it's really busy. Lots of stuff happens constantly. Each act felt like it had enough plot to be a whole play, and at least one scene felt that way (Act 4, scene 6). All I knew of the play before pretty much happens in Act I.

Lear is the play where the old king gives his kingdom away to his daughters while he's still alive, while fully intending to still live out his life as a king. He demands words of affection before dividing the land among his three daughters, but one daughter, Cordellia, finds words inadequate. That's a no go, and Lear makes the mistake of banishing her and giving her inheritance to his other two more calculating daughters. And there is the Glouchester's parallel story where illegitimate son Edwin tries to hoodwink legitimate son Edgar out of his inheritance...and the clever boy has other grand schemes too. Alas, things don't go as anyone intends, and resulting in a lot of anger, wars, killings, eyes getting gouged out and smashed on the stage, loyal servants and subjects of various levels playing various key roles, a moment at the maybe only metaphorical edge of the White Cliffs of Dover, and a very dark and not funny but actually really funny fool. Life lessons are learned, the arrogant are bitterly enlightened and humbled, but only a few are left standing.

It's all exhausting, but also really fascinating and there are many levels, some of them deeply psychological. My edition included a bibliography with an actual summary of all the key points in each work cited(!!). That was pretty cool and gave me insights like this, from Susan Snyder's “King Lear and the Psychology of Dying.” (Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 449–60).

"Structuring her analysis of the play around the tenets of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s influential On Death and Dying (1969), which outlined five stages in the dying process—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—Snyder locates naturalistic and symbolic correspondences to these stages in Lear’s and Gloucester’s loss of power (“ which is . . . what dying is about”)"

Shakespeare doesn't need a recommendation, at least this one certainly doesn't. I think we all know of it. But this one does need some further re-reading and exploration.

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58. King Lear (Folger Shakespeare Library) by William Shakespeare
editors: Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (also has an essay by Susan Snyder)
originally performed: 1605 or 1606 (this edition is 2015)
format: 349 page Kindle ebook
acquired: October 26
read: Oct 26 – Nov 21
time reading: 14 hr 56 min, 2.6 min/page
rating: 5