King Lear :: essays research papers

mightiness Lear is widely regarded as Shakespe atomic number 18s enthrone artistic achievement. The scenes in which a mad Lear rages naked on a stormy heath against his deceitful daughters and nature itself are considered by numerous scholars to be the finest example of tragic lyricism in the English language. Shakespeare took his main(prenominal) plot line of an aged monarch abused by his children from a folk tale that appeared first in written form in the 12th century and was based on spoken stories that originated much besides into the Middle Ages. In several written versions of "Lear," the king does non go mad, his "good" daughter does not die, and the tale has a happy leftovering.This is not the case with Shakespeares Lear, a tragedy of such consuming force that audiences and readers are left to wonder whether there is any meaning to the physical and lesson carnage with which King Lear concludes. Like the noble Kent, seeing a mad, piteous Lear with the murdered Cordelia in his arms, the profound brutality of the tale compels us to wonder, "Is this the promised end?" (V.iii.264). That very question stands at the divide between traditional critics of King Lear who find a heroic pattern in the story and late readers who see no redeeming or purgative dimension to the romp at all, the message being the bare futility of the human condition with Lear as Everyman. As in Macbeth terror reaches its utmost height, in King Lear the horse sense of compassion is exhausted. The principal characters here are not those who act, but those who suffer. We sport not in this, as in most tragedies, the picture of a calamity in which the sudden blows of fate seem still to purity the head which they strike, and where the loss is always accompanied by some flattering consolation in the memory of the former possession but a fall from the highest elevation into the deepest abyss of misery, where humanity is stripped of all outer and internal a dvantages, and given up a prey to naked helplessness.The duple dignity of a king, an old man, and a father, is dishonored by the roughshod ingratitude of his unnatural daughters the old king, who out of a foolish center has given away everything, is driven out into the world a homeless person beggar the childish imbecility to which he was fast advancing changes into the wildest insanity, and when he is rescued from the destitution to which he was abandoned, it is too late.