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Leery:
Bloom starts his King Lear commentary:
“King Lear, together with Hamlet, ultimately baffles commentary.”
He goes to conclude something I’ve been aware of for years:
“This is to say that Hamlet and King Lear now constitute either a kind of secular scripture, or a mythology, peculiar fates for two stage plays that almost always have been commercial successes.”
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of Human. NY: Riverhead Books, 1998. Page 476.
And what makes these two so pervasive?
“Lear’s torments are central to us, almost to all of us, since the sorrows of generational strife are necessarily universal.”
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of Human. NY: Riverhead Books, 1998. Page 477.
Why is the character so important? I liked this one passage, hit a good nerve.
“Lear is at once father, king, and a kind of mortal god: he is the image of male authority, perhaps the ultimate representation of the Dead White European Male.”
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of Human. NY: Riverhead Books, 1998. Page 478.
“There are four great roles in The Tragedy of King Lear, though you might not know that from most stagings of the play. Cordelia’s, for all her pathos, in not one of them, nor are Goneril’s and Regan’s of the same order of dramatic eminence as the roles of Lear and the Fool. Edmund and Edgar, antithetical half brothers, require actors as skilled and powerful as do Lear and the Fool.”
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of Human. NY: Riverhead Books, 1998. Pages 479-80.
More Lear history.
