King Lear : a tragedy by Shakespeare, considered his most pessimistic work.
... to commit a crime? And if intentions are to be counted, I feel that I am a criminal. I am a student of Shakespeare and his four tragedies have influenced me greatly: Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello and King Lear. Macbeth was a noble man but degenerated through selfish ambition into an unfaithful murderer; Hamlet was also a noble man, but besieged by dualities, indecisions and doubts, he ruined his soul, happiness... happiness of Ophelia and drew the curtain of death over several others. Othello was a great lover but stung by jealousy, he smothered his most beloved wife and then ended his own life. And King Lear became a victim of betrayal and descended into the abyss of frenzy and self-destruction. I find that I am each one of them, and if I am still respected, it is only because of the false veils that I am wearing... covered with dirty linens without even realizing how dirty they were! And as I began to look at myself, I too found within myself the same Macbeth, the same Hamlet, the same Othello and the same King Lear. I realised that there were standards nobler and profounder than those described in the books of Law in the light of which I stood guilty and unworthy of any kind of honour." Balwant stopped ...
... dramas, the mystery of two such stages preceding the one he deals with in Hamlet: one in Macbeth and the other in King Lear. Indeed these three mighty creations form a triology with the Karma of the human soul at different crises as its theme. King Lear represents human consciousness low down in the scale of evolution, almost at its start – a nature primitive and barbarian. We ...
... coign of vantage, but this bird Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle. Where they most breed and haunt, I have observ'd The air is delicate.¹ The next scene is the famous episode in King Lear where Gloucester attempts – though vainly – comically, to kill himself. Here is the photograph, rather the cinematograph that defies, surpasses all cinema-artifice. I present it in two parts: ... good night. If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus, The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste Enter Horatio and Marcellus Fran. I think I hear them. Stand, ho! Who is there? ¹ King Lear, Act IV, Sc. 6. Page 173 Hor. Friends to this ground. Mar. And liegemen to the Dane. Fran. Give you good night. Mar. O, farewell, honest soldier! Who hath reliev'd you ...
... hungers — the vital impulses in a super-state, as it were — that are responsible for all massive creations giving from to the Spirit's vision: a Pyramid of Gaza, a Borobudur temple-complex, a King Lear, a Ninth Symphony, a Sistine-Chapel-ceiling. And the supramentalisation of matter depends essentially on the reckless self-abandonment of man's vital being to the Divine's call. The Mother once ...
... but all that he does see then is the action of certain tremendous life-forces, which he either sets in a living symbol or indicates behind the human action, as in Macbeth , or embodies, as in King Lear , in a tragically uncontrollable possession of his human characters. Nevertheless, his is not a drama of mere externalised action, for it lives from within and more deeply than our external life. ...
... Satan, 267, 280 Sati, 268 Schweitzer, Albert, 359 Sedan, 106 Shakespeare, , 120, 160, 182, 194, 197, 251, 337 -Hamlet, 185, 188n., 386n -King Lear, 185 -Mm;beth, 185 Shankaracharya, 8, 215-16, 229, 276 Shaw, Bernard, 140, 145, 254 -Back to Methuselah, 140 Shelley, 194 Shiva, 268 ...
... -"Deluge",68n -"The Errant Life", 74n Shakespeare, 6, 52, 57, 71, 83, 85, 93, 168, 170, 176, 178, 233-4, 266 -A Midsummer Night's Dream, 57n -Hamlet, 163, 173, 175n., 185n -King Lear, 171, 173n -Macbeth, 170, 171n -Romeo & .Juliet, 176n -Sonnets, 178-9 -The Winter's Tale, 233n Shankara, 246, 277, 282 Shelley, 68, 71, 98, 235 Shita1a, 180 Siddhacharyas ...
... earthly pleasure, the embrace of physical bodies with each other, as it were. But Valmiki deals with experiences and realities that exceed the bounds of ordinary earthly life. Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear are the highlights of Shakespearae's creation. Valmiki's heroes and heroine are Rama, Ravana and Sita. The characters depicted by Shakespeare are men as men are or would be. But even the human characters ...
... physical is the only real realm and the subtle is unreal or less real; the subtle may be equally real, even more real and concrete, even more physical, as it were. A physical blow is painful, but King Lear went mad because of a subtle blow, the blow of ingratitude which hit him more than the lashes of howling wild winds. One may forget the joy of physical embrace but there is a delight of sheer love ...
... scholar & litterateur Prof Wilson in introducing the Vicramorvaseum to English readers, is at pains to inform them that in the "mad scene" of this play they must not expect the sublime madness of King Lear, but a much tamer affair conformable to the mild, domestic & featureless Hindu character & the feebler pitch of Hindu poetic genius. The good Professor might have spared himself the trouble. Beyond ...
... or a Shakespeare. Is the life of a great poet, either, made up only of magnificent and important things? How many "trivial" things had to be dealt with and done before there could be produced a King Lear or a Hamlet ! Again, according to your own reasoning, would not people be justified in mocking at your pother—so they would call it, I do not—about metre and scansion and how many ways a syllable ...
... the life of a great poet, either, made up only of magnificent and important things? How many "trivial" things had to be dealt with and done before there could Page 672 be produced a King Lear or a Hamlet ! Again, according to your own reasoning, would not people be justified in mocking at your pother—so they would call it, I do not—about metre and scansion and how many ways a syllable ...
... meaningful. I'll write the whole list on the blackboard with the important letters standing out from the rest. Read off all that falls in vertical line with the big letter of the first title: KING LEAR MACBETH MEASURE FOR MEASURE MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING HAMLET TWELFTH NIGHT Isn't the result a bit of an eye-opener? So cryptograms can prove anything. And to this over-ingenious sample ...
... in significance with the passage of time. The completion of a poem or its first publication marks no more than the beginning of its unpredictable life. Dante' sDivina Commedia, Shakespeare's King Lear, Milton's Paradise Lost, Goethe's Faust, not to mention works like the Gita: have we yet come to the end of our 'understanding' of these constituents of the human heritage? This applies even ...
... Napoleon, or a Shakespeare. Is the life of a great poet either made up only of magnificent and important things? How many "trivial" things had to be dealt with and done before there could be produced a "King Lear" or a "Hamlet"? Again, according to your own reasoning, would Page 295 not people be justified in mocking at your pother—so they would call it, I do not—about metre and scansion and ...
... don't dislike him: on the contrary, we feel we could enjoy his society. Most of us would rather take Falstaff out fishing or put him up at our golf club than we would Antonio or the Doge of Venice or King Lear. He'd make a bigger hit." 1 And what about Monsieur Jourdain, that delectable creation of the unsurpassed genius of comedy, Moliere? "Polish me", entreated Jourdain who was a nouveau riche ...
... Jeanne d'Arc 48 Jules Romains 39 Jules Supervielle 55 Juno 34 Jupiter 32 Jouve 76, 77 K Kali 78 Kalidasa 17, 18, 27, 32 Kanhu 83 Kanwa 8 King Lear 20 King Zeus 34 Krishna 31, 78 Kronos 4 Kumbhodara 17 Kutsa 8 L Lalan the Fakir 84 Laocoon 18 London 10 Lombards 50 M Macbeth 19 ...
... physical is the only real realm and the subtle is unreal or less real; the subtle may be equally real, even more real and concrete, even more physical, as it were. A physical blow is painful, but King Lear went mad because of a subtle blow, the blow of ingratitude which hit him more than the slashes of howling wild winds. One may forget the joy of physical embrace but there is a delight of sheer love ...
... bird Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle. Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed The air is delicate. The next scene is the famous episode in King Lear where Gloucester attempts—though vainly—comically, to kill himself. Here is the photograph, rather the cinematograph that defies, surpasses all cinema-artifice. I present it in two parts: ...
... divine trophy and treasuring it in his earthly home: he succeeded in possessing the treasure as he continued to be in the service of the Divine. ¹ Vikramorllasie, Act IV, Sc. II. ² King Lear, Act III, Sc., II. Page 391 ...
... 182, 186, 279 Sarama, 330 Saraswati, 189 Sati, 184 Satyavan, 242-6 Savitri, 242-6, 252-3, 307 Shakespeare, 228, 386, 391 – Hamlet, 386n – Julius Caesar, 386n – King Lear, 391n Shankara, 104-5, 309, 344 Sindhus, 330 Shiva, 106, 182, 184, 207, 297 Socrates, 196,297, 379 Soma, 330 Sri Aurobindo, 3, 8,9, 29n., 42,46,51, 90, 101n., 105, 120, 135 ...
... the passage of time. The completion of a poem or its first publication marks no more than the beginning of its unpredictable life. Dante's Commedia, Page 683 Shakespeare's King Lear, Milton's epic, Goethe's Faust, not to mention works like the Gita: have we yet come to the end of our 'understanding' of these constituents of the human heritage? This applies even more, perhaps ...
... during the dreary years of exile. While Timocles is effusive ("Mother, my sweet mother"), Antiochus (like Cordelia) is formal: "Madam, I seek your blessing." Cleopatra reacts to this not unlike King Lear, and she is not unwilling - as slyly advised by Cleone - to name Timocles, not Antiochus, the new King. There are quick developments. While Phayllus and Cleone scheme to make the most of their ...
... to render that fact vivid. I shall take instances picked out by a critic whose name I forget and I shall add one or two the critic seems to have forgotten. On several occasions we have drawn on King Lear's speeches. Here are three lines at almost the beginning of his speech in the midst of the storm on the heath. He is contrasting, in relation to himself, the unruly elements to his ungrateful daughters... speech gets charged with an emotion that breaks down with the completion of every significant phrase, and the breaking down occurs strikingly at a word — "daughters", "unkindness", "children" — reminding Lear of his own tragedy. Wordsworth packs a world of pathos in the plain line about the old farmer Michael who, after a life of labour and loving hope, was heart-broken because of his wastrel son. No ...
... prose would entirely rob his language of its living faithfulness, its onomatopoeic response to the meaning he Page 91 has in mind. What writer of his day could have given us King Lear's lament over the dead Cordelia: Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never! Pray you, undo... — where the audacity of "sprung rhythm" and dramatic anticlimax has not a streak of crudeness or bathos and is a change the unpatterned movement of prose can never emphasise? Or take the mad Lear on the heath: Spit, fire! spout, rain! Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters: I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness; I never gave you kingdom, called you children... I stand, your slave, A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man. Mark how the extra syllable at the close of lines two, three and four produces by its falling rhythm a suggestion as if Lear were breaking down pathetically after each expression of his argument and it is extremely apposite that the point of breaking down in each case is a word reminding him directly of the cause of his misery ...
... woman here who grieves she loves me, And she too must be fighting me for ever With her dim ravenous unsated mind. This is from King Lear's Wife; possibly the tone is meant to anticipate that of the "foolish fond old man" in Shakespeare, though Lear mad seems to have been inspired, and, when sober, just puerile. But even in Bottomley's best play, Gruach, which is conceived as a prelude to... Macbeth in this fashion, that play is surely the most amazing miracle of the human mind, for excepting perhaps a couple of short scenes at the very start, it is one unbroken rush of imaginative grandeur. Lear, that other peak of his genius, has an intenser dramatic Page 52 quality in parts and is vaster in its sweep of occult elemental vision, but the progress of its poetry is not so ...
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