William Shakespeare's King Lear

"Bernard Shaw would claim that [such a performer] couldn't swordplay Shakespeare's characters but only versions of himself, and that he used Shakespeare's texts as genuine quaries for the makings of original romantic dramas in which to exhibit characters of his own excogitation" (Shattuck 1810). Lear's rant at the storm was treated as the type - and cliche - of Romantic millism fight unbeatable betting odds:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage, blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench'd our steeples, [drown'd] the cocks!

You sulph'rous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my clean head! (III, i, 1-6)

Upon such a stage the Lear myth compete well, if not the play per se: that of the old warrior fighting against the shabbiness of filial and political betrayal. The mythic version, in fact, found more than favor with the likes of such literary giants as Leo Tolstoy than did Shakespeare's text (Kermode 1250). It was a very "Sturm un Drang" (Storm and Stress) exposition; which is not surprising since the founders of romance in the late 1700s took Shakespeare as nonpareil of their models. In the puritanical literary view, Shakespeare's plays were viewed more in terms of melodrama or, at best, " blemish" attempts at tragedy; certainly Lear does not stay in spite of appearance the boundaries of the classic "Unities" of Time, Place

That lord whose evanesce must nurse my plight shall carry

In the Freudian interpretation of Lear, one can easily imagine Marlon Brando as the ageing king. "Stella!" Brando-cum-Stanley Kowalski cries in the rain in A Streetcar Named Desire, and one knows immediately that it is an interior howl echoing Lear's storm-soaked shout "O Regan, Goneril!" (III, iv, 19). In that sentiment one still hears reverberations of the Romantic hero when Lear cries - but now the children cry back. Edgar-turned-Poor Tom could be throng Dean shivering in the practice of law station at the beginning of Rebel Without A Cause while the police and his parents rant and rave about him (II, iii, 20-21):

[This production] discovered ...

not the booming, righteously indignant titan of old, but an edgy, capricious old man, toilsome to live with. In short [Brook] has dared to direct King Lear from a standpoint of moral neutrality (26).

Since the 1920s and continuing through with(predicate) to today, the influence of psychoanalysis upon the critical consciousness has led to a different, more naturalistic direction of Shakespearean interpretation in general, upon King Lear in specific. Freudian theory was first to take root. With its Oedipal and Orestian inferences, Freudian critical theory found fertile primer coat in Lear.

Whereas the psychoanalytical approach seeks interior meaning for everything in Lear, the existential interpretation involves a more cosmic overview, a mixture of cruelty and absurdity - and moral neutrality. This is a not-surprising evolution, glide path as it does from critics, theorists and creative talent who experienced firsthand the horrors of a world where mass murder became official policy of the Hitler and Stalin regimes, where individuals could be swept aside in an instant - yet still, more or less comically, would occasionally pop up to face the flow. "Facing the tide" is a somewhat different thing than the Romantic "fighting the storm": in the existential experience of a Samuel Beckett, on
Order your essay at Orderessay and get a 100% original and high-quality custom paper within the required time frame.