Word: lear
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...quite believe it. The fact is, no one is really convinced that the tormented figures of modern drama have the stature of tragic heroes. The measure of that disbelief is to imagine Jocasta asking an audience to pay attention to Oedipus, or Cordelia to Lear. Try not paying attention to them...
...most of all. The rising middle class was not interested in the fall of princes and the death of kings. The romantic, ameliorative, democratic temper could abide neither the aristocratic pride of the tragic hero nor his implacable doom. Democracy has bred the kind of mind that believes King Lear would have been better off in a home for senior citizens...
...whites. Where in Genet's The Balcony men act out their dreams, in The Blacks they act out their nightmares as well. Often unbridled, sacrilegious, obscene, The Blacks is echoing too at times, with travestied ceremonies, Pirandellian illusion and reality, a sense of secular Black Masses and King Lear mock trials. A savage Negro assault that is also a Genet indictment, in places The Blacks indicts the savagery as well...
...doubtful, however, that anyone had any ideas to begin with. Marion Lear, one of the four girls who had organized the lynching, said it aimed at "ending political apathy and unawareness at Wheaton." Miss Lear admitted that she herself couldn't name the President of Cuba because she "never read newspapers...
Social Chance. Brecht begins where Lear ends: the world is a rack on which mankind is tortured. A character in one of the plays is asked to recite what is called the short catechism-"it'll get worse, it'll get worse, it'll get worse." Starting thus, Brecht might have developed a tragic sense, but he apparently balked at three basic elements of tragedy-the idea of inevitability, human guilt, and the tragic hero. In Brecht's plays, G.O.D. is indeed just a word, and Fate becomes the blind workings of social chance...