A measured, thoughtful assessment of a key play in the Shakespeare canon.
The noted critic and English professor digs deep to uncover what makes this play so profound.
After books on Falstaff and Cleopatra, the third installment in Bloom’s (Humanities/Yale Univ.) Shakespeare’s Personalities series takes on King Lear, who, along with Prince Hamlet, is one of “Shakespeare’s most challenging personalities.” These two plays are the “ultimate dramas yet conceived by humankind.” High praise indeed from the prolific author who, now in his late 80s, wrestles with the complexities of another man also in his 80s. Bloom brings this dark tale of a king in search of love to life via his incisive close reading of the text. As he writes, King Lear is the “most ironic of all tragedies, surpassing even Hamlet.” Noting all the times the word “nothing” is used, this “nihilistic play” leaps “beyond hope, into nothingness.” Lear has an “enormous need to be loved,” especially by his youngest daughter, Cordelia. Her sisters, Goneril and Regan, Bloom writes, are “monsters of the deep, preying upon their victims, and at last on one another.” The author does a fine job of explicating Edgar, the “just and rational avenger.” In the first two quartos of the play, Bloom notes, Edgar is given special prominence in the play’s lengthy title. After Lear, he’s the “crucial personality in the drama.” From Poor Tom to serving man to peasant to messenger to masked knight, “in all of Shakespeare, there is nothing like these astonishing metamorphoses.” The “ultimate atrocities” in the play are Cornwall’s gouging of Gloucester’s eyes, enacted before us, and the hanging of Cordelia, done offstage. “In what must be the shattering beyond all measure,” writes Bloom, “in Shakespeare and indeed all Western literature, Lear enters with the dead Cordelia in his arms.”
A measured, thoughtful assessment of a key play in the Shakespeare canon.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6419-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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