Word: lear
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...King Lear is, among other things, Shakespeare's prophetic contribution to the 20th-century Theatre of the Absurd. In the Lear world, even more than in that of Hamlet, the time is out of joint. Divine justice seems to be on a holiday; and we ask, "What is running the universe...
...this play Shakespeare stretched his reach as nowhere else. Indeed no other dramatist has ever taken on so huge and so impossible a task for the stage--not even Goethe with his Faust or Wagner with his Ring of the Nibelungen. Lear cannot achieve total success in performance; nor can Faust. But is this any reason to side with all those who continue to say they shouldn't be tried? With both works, enough is viable to warrant the attempt...
Since Shakespeare is, in Lear, grappling with the whole cosmos, his range here is enormous. He indulges in uncompromising extremes; and it is not surprising that the play contains both the most melting scene in all drama and also the most revolting. Appropriately, Shakespeare chose his grandest Manneristic style of writing--for he is dealing mainly with the distorted, the abnormal, the foreshortened, and the supersensitive...
...intensifies his guilt; his guilt mounts to anguish, and his anguish drives him to the far edge of sanity. The moment-to-moment danger, tension and exhilaration of the play is not that Hamlet will kill the king, but that he will lose his reason. His silent plea is Lear's spoken "Oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven." By insisting on being cool and levelheaded, Grizzard removes the nervous system of the play; by insisting that Hamlet be normal, he makes he one demand that the most complex character in English drama cannot meet...
MATTHEW H. LEAR Glenview...