The Connell Guide To Shakespeare's King Lear by Valentine Cunningham

The Connell Guide To Shakespeare's King Lear by Valentine Cunningham

Lear is too much. There's too much to stomach, an overdoing of massive wickednesses which rightly provoked perhaps the most famous reaction to King Lear ever, Dr Samuel Johnson's horror in his Prefaces to his Shakespeare (1765) over the blinding of Gloucester -an act too horrid to be endured in dramatick exhibition - and the death of Cordelia: contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of the chronicles. There are indeed just too many awful enhancements of the Lear stories Shakespeare drew on, a superfluity of terrible things - and of course these, as Valentine Cunningham says, are uneasily central to a play which teaches the immorality of the well-off having a superflux of money and things when the poor have so little. So what explains the dramatic success of Lear? The great critic A.C. Bradley had grave reservations about it, but he conceded, this play was the fullest revelation of Shakespeare's power - up there with Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, Dante's Divine Comedy, Beethoven's symphonies and Michelangelo's statues; the most moving and daunting of tragic experiences the world has ever known promoted by a greatly trashy plot, or, as the poet and critic D. J. Enright puts in his lively book about teaching Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the Students (1970): It is possible that Shakespeare never did anything more awe-inspiring, more improbable-seeming than this - to take a petulant old retired monarch, drive him mad and stick flowers in his hair, and still end with a figure of tragedy.

Valentine Cunningham is a Senior Fellow in English Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and an Oxford University Professor of English Language and Literature. He has written several reviews on literary matters, given numerous BBC radio talks on literary and musicological issues, given numerous lectures on literary and literary-historical topics around the world, served as a Visiting Professor of Literature in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Germany, and judged numerous literary prizes, including the Man-Booker Prize (twice!). Everywhere Said Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (1975), British Writers of the Thirties (1988), In the Reading Gaol: (Post)modernity, Texts, and History (1994), Reading After Theory (2002), and Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems, Poetics (2011) are only a few of his publications. The Penguin Book of Spanish War Poems (1980), Spanish Front: Poets on the Civil War (1986), and The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (2000) are among his publications.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781907776236
ISBN 10	1907776230
Title	The Connell Guide To Shakespeare's King Lear
Author	Valentine Cunningham
Series	The Connell Guide To
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	CONNELL PUBLISHING LTD
Year published	2012-09-30
Number of pages	136
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.