King Lear (1605–6) is the primary enactment of psychic breakdown in English literary history. It constitutes, also, the most spectacular instance of a controlled explosion of the formal ‘container’ in Western drama – such that it not only violated whatever Aristotle or Boileau might have to offer on the proper structure of tragedy but provoked, too, the very different sensibilities of Dr Johnson and Count Tolstoy. Set in its raw pre-Christian world, the play remains the major Shakespearean rebuttal of Sophoclean fearful symmetry (Oedipus Rex) – corrosive in its existential negativity, yet paradoxically fructive in spawning such twentieth-century ‘countertransferential’ progeny as George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame or Edward Bond’s Lear. Keats, on rereading it wrote about the ‘bitter-sweet’ of being ‘consumèd in the fire’, with all the intensity of one closely associated with ‘Consumption’.
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King Lear
The Lost Leader; Group Disintegration, Transformation and Suspended Reconsolidation
Dennis Brown
Roger Stritmatter and Lynne Kositsky
Gary Taylor's 1982 Review of English Studies article, 'A New Source and an Old Date for King Lear', highlights numerous semantic, thematic and structural parallels between Shakespeare's King Lear, customarily assigned a composition date in late 1605 or spring 1606, and Eastward Ho (first published September 1605). Deconstructing Taylor's methodology for determining the order of influence between the two plays, we argue that the authors of Eastward Ho found the bard's cosmic tragedy of royal intrigue and intergenerational strife an irresistible target for rambunctious topical satire. In place of a Lear that without motive incorporates vague patches of Eastward Ho influence, we read an Eastward Ho that enacts an acerbically brilliant parody of several Shakespeare plays, among them King Lear.
Mehrdad Bidgoli
Scepticism about Lear's ethical turning point in William Shakespeare's King Lear (1606) is an oblique but prevalent issue in the recent ethically attuned readings of this highly controversial tragedy. But it appears that critics are reluctant to
‘Abd al-Raḥīm Kamāl’s Dahsha
An Upper Egyptian Lear
Noha Mohamad Mohamad Ibraheem
consequences both for him and for his cherished youngest. This is the plot of the 2014 Egyptian television series Dahsha (Perplexity), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear in Ṣaʿīdī (Upper Egyptian) dialect, written by ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Kamāl and directed
Teatrum Mundi
Teaching Shakespeare Performance to Israeli Medical Students
Rebecca Gillis
In 2014 Ben Hubbard reported for The New York Times on a production of King Lear put on in Arabic, by Syrian refugee children, in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. 1 The children reported that working on this play with their director
In European Judaism
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 143–151 (9 total)
Egypt between Two Shakespeare Quadricentennials 1964–2016
Reflective Remarks in Three Snapshots
Hazem Azmy
read the events that led to the 25 January revolution and its subsequent complications through the lens of King Lear . For an illustration of this statement one needs to go no futher than the example of the National Theatre’s blockbuster 2002
Keith Jones
. The novel opens with an actor putting on King Lear – and dying from a heart attack in the middle of Act IV, Scene VI. That night, a devastating pandemic (the Georgia flu) arrives in America. It sweeps across America and around the world, killing
Identity and Gender Politics in Contemporary Shakespearean Rewriting
Julia Pascal’s The Yiddish Queen Lear
Özlem Özmen
British Jewish playwright Julia Pascal has written two adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, The Shylock Play (2009, based on The Merchant of Venice) and The Yiddish Queen Lear (1999, based on King Lear) , in which she discusses Jewish
In European Judaism
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 196–204 (9 total)
Richard H. Weisberg
association of interpretive corruptness with political corruptness carries with it religious overtones when, for example in Merchant , Christian distortions of the law win the day over Jewish pleas for just recognition of the law. 5 Similarly, King Lear
Bringing Lebanon’s Civil War Home to Anglophone Literature
Alameddine’s Appropriation of Shakespeare’s Tragedies
Yousef Awad
the conflict. This article explores the ways in which, in these two novels, Alameddine draws attention to Shakespeare’s representation of traumatic events in Macbeth and King Lear and links it to his own depiction of his nation’s tragic domestic