Here’s Why You Shouldn’t miss out on Shakespeare’s
KING LEAR
[Don’t worry, no essential spoilers ahead — all clear 😉!]
Like all of Shakespeare’s works,
King Lear is a prolific heart wrenching tragedy that surpasses the depth and transcendence while focusing on the action of the play, teaching us the importance of better judgement from ignorance and folly.
Throughout the scenes Lear, a self-satisfied monarch is portrayed as a king who seeks the advantages of power even when he had given them up and expects to be treated as a king all the more. Blind to the consequences of his actions, he is unaccustomed to anyone questioning him or even telling him the truth. In the absence of any sort of honest feedback, he is a man who thinks himself much different than how he is. In other words, Lear doesn’t know himself. He splits his kingdom in two, giving half to one daughter and half to the other. To his third and dearest and loving daughter, he gives nothing for falling to flatter him enough like the other sisters.
Though the scenes are set in the late 17th century and is about a king, King Lear is very engaging and empathetic; And relatable in many ways as the story engages in violence, suffering, pain, loyalty and disloyalty, subtle comedy, about parents and children, about wisdom and foolishness, and about the many forms of madness — arrogance, greed, anger, ambition, dementia and pride.
All the while taking the readers through an emotional roller coaster. It teaches us that no matter what we have accomplished and who we’ve become in the public eye, it does not matter for as long as you don’t know yourself. And most importantly “Love’s not love
When it is mingled with regards that stand
Aloof from th’ entire point.”
Thrilling to the bone with blood splattering murders and hangings and a suicide and not one, but two eyes being ripped out.
[Bonus: my favorite part -]
“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
When we are sick in fortune, — often the surfeit
of our own behavior, — we make guilty of our
Disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
If we were villains by necessity; fools by
Heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star.”
