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What are readers saying about King Lear (The New Folger Library Shakespeare)?
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-07-19 03:02:26.
(Language: English)
 
My favorite of Shakespeare's plays.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-02-13 02:37:15.
(Language: English)
 
Profound and sad.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-08-01 10:32:37.
(Language: English)
gud 1
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Kelsey posted a review at 2010-11-26 10:03:00.
(Language: English)
One of the best Shakespeare plays I've read- to see it on stage would make it or break it for me, I feel.
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eva posted a review at 2011-05-07 04:17:24.
(Language: English)
Definite like. We don't want to think bad thing about our family, but the truth is, we don't always have loving faithful family members. It would be good to find those who truly love us before we desperately HAVE to, but its definitely tragic what King Lear discovers as he is dying.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-02-01 10:04:27.
(Language: English)
This is the only time I can honestly say I was unable to put a Shakespearean work down until I finished.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-03-21 04:47:08.
(Language: English)
If not the greatest dramatic tragedy in English, it certainly is among the very few which contend for that title (along with Riders to the Sea, Juno and the Paycock, Endgame, Hamlet, Macbeth). Also, today, March 20, 2008 one of the greatest Lears-maybe even THE greatest-Paul Scofield has died. His film version, directed by Peter Brook, is currently out of print (and I don't believe yet transferred to DVD), and yet is essential viewing. Barrage your video/dvd dealers about this.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-03-17 06:31:23.
(Language: English)
A king foolishly divides his kingdom between his scheming two oldest daughters and estranges himself from the daughter who loves him truly;beautiful book on the complexities of family relationships.
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Kate posted a review at 2010-07-07 07:40:40.
(Language: English)
A silly old man with 2 wicked daughters and a fool following him around. Quite the read.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-03-13 12:30:33.
(Language: English)
As far as Shakespeare goes, this is not my favorite. It is real drama going on here (no pun intended), not much of the melodrama that occurs in his other tragedies. It is very sad and difficult to mock.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-06-29 06:12:45.
(Language: English)
loved it! my fav Shakespeare book!
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-07-09 09:52:04.
(Language: English)
My favourite weepie. Powerful stuff
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-08-22 09:39:14.
(Language: English)
I read this play, thinking it was a classic. I was right. Honestly, what more can be said of Lear? It is a sort of uber-tragedy, with the same sort of metaphysical questions tackled in the Book of Job. Amazingly concise, too; this play could've been a sprawling, self-indulgent disaster in lesser hands, but this Shakespeare guy knows what he's doing all the way. Also highly recommended-- Christopher Moore's "Fool" retells this play from the point of view of The Fool.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-09-16 03:03:52.
(Language: English)
(5 stars from 5) Considered as a tale with a lead role too deep and too difficult to be staged effectively by any actor, it took the the viewings of actors of the likes of Olivier and Tatsuya Nakadai to prove the notion wrong. Shakespeare weaves the greatest of all his tales around the old legend behind it; although the violence is perhaps too much for many high schools to adapt it, the sweeping drama from all of the characters, the development of their personalities, and the inevitable, stirring conclusion form the most delicate fictional tale in history. Haunting, beautiful, poetic, stunning, and nearly perfect - all is fine here with the exception of the early, unexplained exit of The Fool, who showed his full potential in his expanded role in the unforgettable Kurosawa adaptation, Ran.
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Marcel posted a review at 2009-09-06 07:51:47.
(Language: English)
I agree that Ishiguro had that rare, Lear-like courage to look unblinkingly into the never, never, never, never, never, never Abyss Beneath the Abyss and not pull back. Secondly, a common sentiment -- "I am personally sick to death of hearing the constant refrain of “Holocaust” and “anti-Semitism” in response to even the mildest perceived criticism of Israeli policy." The fatal flaw with this feeling is that the anti-Semitism that fueled the Holocaust IS behind too much of the world's criticism of Israel. Our urge to "put the Holocaust behind us" -- especially in terms of coming to grips with our own anti-Semitism and culpability -- is not new. I recommend Cynthia Ozick's amazing essay "Who Owns Anne Frank" in which she chronicles the attempts to take the "Hebrew element" and any criticism of Germans out of both the publication of Frank's diary and the ensuing play in the 1950's -- a play written by non-Jews to emphasize the universality and "happy playfulness" of Anne Frank at the expense of all reality. "I certainly have no wish to inflict depression on the audience," said the producer Garson Kanin. "I don't consider that a legitimate theatrical end." (so much for HAMLET and KING LEAR.) When asked why the play substituted jolly jingles during the one Jewish ceremony shown in it -- a Hanukkah ceremony celebrated in the annex -- when the Frank family actually had sung "Rock of Ages," Kanin replied "Hebrew would simply alienate the audience." Those crude sexual inuendo and countless political connections and profoundly disturbing elements -- say the unrelieved, unprecedented, never-equaled nihilism of King Lear -- are there for a reason. As you've all probably noticed, the Fool in King Lear is never on stage at the same time as Cordelia. Theatrical tradition often has the same actor (or actress now) play both, even though they are separate "people" in the play. You're reading a man who just re-read THE TRAGEDY OF KING LEAR last night. (For about the 300th time.) Now THAT is despair. Nihilism at it's most brilliant. Staggering artistic courage to stare down into the Big Gulp beneath the Absolute Abyss without blinking or flinching. Accepting a universe where the only law and commandment is "never, never, never, never, never." He uses all the techniques (and flags and promises) of comedy to produce his most unassailable tragedies -- up through Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra to the ultimate nihilistic statements of King Lear and Othello. And the same, of course, can be said of his best comedies -- everywhere they skate on the very thin ice of tragedy. Even as we laugh, there is a sense of real and imminent danger of things swerving, as they did in King Lear, into inconsolable loss (not just of another loved one, but of dignity, reason, a sense that there is any order in the universe.) Anyway, in terms of revision, it appears that "Hamlet," one of two truly boundless masterpieces the Bard created (the other being "King Lear"), was the one he worked on and revised the most, whatever the template's origins, perhaps rewriting it from scratch over and over for ten years or more. Late last night I was happily re-reading a light Shakespearean comedy (King Lear) when suddenly I rose from bed, went downstairs to my library, and pulled the 1989 Vintage Paperback of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day off a shelf and spent a few hours re-reading it (instead of the yuk-fest Lear.) Perhaps some of the events of the long day had subconsciously prompted this re-reading. Personally, I've always heard Shakespeare's private sense of being trapped in such a time in the cry from Edgar in King Lear when Edgar has been forced to assume a disguise and flee for his life (as so many former teachers, friends, and acquaintances of Shakespeare had been forced to.) "I heard myself proclaimed," the banished and outlawed Edgar cries: And by the happy hollow of a tree Escaped the hunt. No port is free; no place, That guard, and most unusual vigilance, Does not attend my taking. Whiles I may 'scape, I will preserve myself . . . . (II.iii.1-6) I would suggest that this disjuncture between language and action, the tension and rancidness that lay just under the surface of a comedy ("Love's Labours Lost") and a history-tragedy ("Julius Caesar") -- not to mention every other work of Shakespeare's up to and including "Hamlet" and "King Lear," -- is an even greater problem when it comes to poor and disfunctional rhetoric in the life of our nation. Someone said that the true test of art -- as opposed to just entertainment -- in art, literature, movie, film, or any creative medium, is that you can view, read, watch, or listen to a work of art many times over and each time you discover something new in it. It keeps opening up before you the deeper you move into it. It's what makes "Hamlet" and "King Lear" so incomparable. The operative word in "Keep It Simple, Stupid" is after the comma . . . "Stupid." The phrase is addressing you as "Stupid." Writers shouldn't do that. Condescending towards one's readership is sometimes a recipe for bestsellerdom, but is also, invariably, a recipe for literary disaster (in terms of how short-lived and shallow your work is destined to be.) Sometimes writers' styles are simple. Sometimes that simplicity is part of a complex plan. More often it is just a matter of being childish, poorly educated, and extremely limited in one's craft. The partially educated writing for the preliterate. Using "simple words" all the time proves nothing. Newspapers in America do that because they've decided that their average reader can't handle any vocabulary over that approved for sixth-graders (11-yr-olds, for our foreign visitors). And even then they rarely choose the right word. (KATRINA DECIMATES GULF COAST!) In "The Tragedy of King Lear," Shakespeare included more than a hundred and fifty new words -- new to the English language! -- that were probably unfamiliar to his mixed-class, mixed-education audience, but which he trusted them to figure out from Latin roots and their context. A hundred of those newly coined words had come from Montaigne's essays, which Shakespeare had just read in translation. Thank God he never adopted the "Keep It Simple, Stupid" algorithm. Nor did Melville in "Moby Dick." Nor Saul Bellow in any of this novels. Nor James Joyce. Nor Nabokov. Nor Gass. Nor Barth. Nor Pynchon. Nor Ondaatje. Nor Hemingway -- however deceptively simple his prose and word choice look to those unwilling or unable to look more carefully.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-08-11 02:46:13.
(Language: English)
My favorite Shakespeare.
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Tim posted a review at 2011-08-14 05:40:45.
(Language: English)
Shakespeare isn't the best choice for a busy subway ride.
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A Reader posted a review at 2012-03-07 12:44:23.
(Language: English)
Amazing! This is a truly complex and sophisticated tragedy which incorporates multiple layers of plot and symbolism both. It also provides an interesting insight, from a Renaissance perspective, of earliest Britain.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-08-01 10:08:50.
(Language: English)
I think Lear is the metaphorical train wreck of Shakespeares work. It's set up in the beginning to be sort of humorously melancholy, and it just spirals downward from there. And that's the thing, you just watch in fascination as this old man's world comes crumbling in around him, everyone he holds dear either betrays him or dies, and the body count just keeps tacking on zeros. So, yeah...Lust, revenge, and blood. Yay blood!
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-07-17 04:21:16.
(Language: English)
King Lear tells the tragic story of the king of britain(Lear) and his three daughters,Goneril,Regan and Cordelia.King Lear plots his own downfall when he summons his daughters and enquires them upon their love for him.King Lear was senile and could not see past Regan and Goneril's empty speeches.But when Cordelia,the one with the only true intention,is disgusted by her sister's she refuses to flatter him with empty words but instead simply tells him that she loves him like a daughter should.King Lear outraged at this,divides the kingdom among his two malicious daughters Goneril and Regan,keeping nothing for himself and banishing Cordelia.From this point we see how the two daughters contributed not only to his downfall as king but to his eventual insanity and death.
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-03-06 07:45:25.
(Language: English)
re-reading King Lear after many years - it's more powerful and more meaningful to me now than it was when I was young. Perhaps not only because I have three daughters myself. We're using this in our MBA program to talk about the inability of government to pre-commit, among other things.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-05-27 05:17:41.
(Language: English)
"Have more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest, lend less than thou owest." Not bad, King Lear, for an old guy going soft in the head.
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Emily posted a review at 2011-05-13 02:08:07.
(Language: English)
"King Lear" is where Shakespeare takes off the gloves. He brings us right to the edge of the abyss, then kicks us over that edge. This is the most devastating by far of the Shakespeare tragedies -- a play which leaves the reader shattered as the curtain falls. I find it hard to explain where the visceral power of this play comes from. The plot is fairly typically Shakespeare, perhaps a little more complicated than usual, mixing elements taken from legend and from the historical record. At the outset, Lear is a narcissistic, bullying despot. His two older daughters, Regan and Goneril, are a couple of bad seed cougars, both of whom lust after Edmund, an equally amoral hyena. Their goody-two-shoes sister Cordelia behaves with such one-note pointless stubbornness, it almost seems like she's not playing with a full deck. Over in the Gloucester household, Edmund (the [...] hyena) is plotting against both his brother Edgar and his father. Lear's court is filled with lickspittle sycophants. Only two people have the guts to speak truth to power, and one of them wears the costume of a Fool. There's a nasty storm brewing on the heath. Characters in "King Lear" pay dearly for their weaknesses. Gloucester is blinded in order that he might see, but is denied any lasting happiness; after reconciling with Edgar, he dies. Lear will be driven insane before he finally learns to empathize with the poor and the meek. We watch him return from the brink of madness only to discover that's not enough. Before the curtain falls, Shakespeare gives us what is arguably the most brutal scene in his entire work.
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-03-11 04:47:09.
(Language: English)
its one of the best works of shakespeare and also a burning example for contemporaries dramatist of shakespearian age.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-11-21 09:45:15.
(Language: English)
"King Lear" is a tragic tale about the fall of a king as a result of his unwise decision to divide his kingdom.Shakespeare delves deep into human nature to show its frailties and irregularities.He further shows that the real power lies in the hands of God,and not even a mighty king can change the course of events in his favour.
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