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3.78 AVERAGE
3.78 AVERAGE
Una de las mejores obras de Shakespeare. Genial sobre el papel y dando un montón de juego a la hora de escenificarla.
Aunque tiene contrapuntos cómicos una gran parte son como los del Quijote, de los que hablan de la locura y te rompen por dentro un poquito.
“Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”
Aunque tiene contrapuntos cómicos una gran parte son como los del Quijote, de los que hablan de la locura y te rompen por dentro un poquito.
“Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”
dark
emotional
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Bleak.
This one I didn’t listen to, just read. I will listen / watch it acted too.
This one I didn’t listen to, just read. I will listen / watch it acted too.
"Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say." --Act V, Scene iii
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
sad
tense
medium-paced
A tragedy of epic proportions, both incredibly beautiful and incredibly sad.
dark
reflective
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
In my opinion, in his top 5 tragedies
Have I really never written about this? Weird.
Reread Lear as part of a doomed-to-failure "Read all the Shakespeare in a Year" project with a few friends. It's wrong somehow to call it the most human of the tragedies, but the tragedy--dad, daughters--is so achingly personal that it is for me easily the most affecting of the Shakespeare plays. Lear is a bungler, quick to anger and quick to judge. In his dotage, he makes a fool's mistake, and sweet baby Jeebus does he pay for it. For him and for his disguised companions and his fool and his fool daughters and the bastards and the forsaken sons and everyone here, life is to be endured. Life is a matter of withstanding tragedies which are coming for you. Oh yes, they are coming for you. And while things do as always come full circle here (Edmund will tell you so plainly), the order that is reaffirmed at the end is a grim, grim, grim order. Edgar--who has spent the play delving deeper and deeper into his emotional resources as he withstands (wait for it) tragedy after tragedy which develops in him a survivor's impulse and a heart swollen with pity for the lamentable state of all mankind--takes the reins, and he will like all of us bear up under the endless stream of tragedies that await us.
And this is all true. Life is--looked at a certain miserable way--a series of tragedies withstood as we march heartbeat by heartbeat towards our dusty graves. But no other Shakespeare addresses this so flatly. The idea, that we must be ready at all times to die, is not unique even in Shakespeare. Hamlet says the "Readiness is all" while Edgar says, "The Ripeness is all", but with Hamlet it feels like a lost line. The Hamlet who sees "providence in the fall of a sparrow" and insists that there is "a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we may" in Act V doesn't feel like he has earned these grim realities. Edgar has. Edgar has seen his king bemaddened, his father blinded, his beloved brother turn on him, and has had his pride and power and position all stripped from him. Edgar can deliver convincingly the line that feels false from Hamlet's lips, and it's a grim stunner.
It's an apocalyptic vision and one only rarely tempered by comedy in this play. As such, for me at least, it's the most emotionally powerful Shakespeare play and maybe for me the only. Perhaps because I have treated them for so long as machines to be picked apart and examined and put back together, the bard's plays don't really have much punch for me emotionally. I pity Ophelia, I weep a bit for Juliet, I cringe for the MacDuff babes, but my heart just plain breaks for Lear. At play's end, when he (SPOILER) walks on stage with his only true daughter's corpse in his arms, asking for a glass to see if she is breathing, wishing with all he has that he could reclaim some of that liberating madness from Act III so as to escape reality, one can't but break. At least one can't but break when one has daughters. This play leaves me in pieces every single time.
Last thing to say: In the context of recently read plays (Antony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night, etc.), Lear reminds you that, when he took his time and revised, Shakespeare had no equals. None. The other plays, they're fine. They're plays. People perform them. But the gap between this work--which feels word by word and line by line like a masterpiece by which I mean he may have done no better in any other play by which I mean no one may ever have done better in any other play--and something like Antony is too wide to calculate.
Reread Lear as part of a doomed-to-failure "Read all the Shakespeare in a Year" project with a few friends. It's wrong somehow to call it the most human of the tragedies, but the tragedy--dad, daughters--is so achingly personal that it is for me easily the most affecting of the Shakespeare plays. Lear is a bungler, quick to anger and quick to judge. In his dotage, he makes a fool's mistake, and sweet baby Jeebus does he pay for it. For him and for his disguised companions and his fool and his fool daughters and the bastards and the forsaken sons and everyone here, life is to be endured. Life is a matter of withstanding tragedies which are coming for you. Oh yes, they are coming for you. And while things do as always come full circle here (Edmund will tell you so plainly), the order that is reaffirmed at the end is a grim, grim, grim order. Edgar--who has spent the play delving deeper and deeper into his emotional resources as he withstands (wait for it) tragedy after tragedy which develops in him a survivor's impulse and a heart swollen with pity for the lamentable state of all mankind--takes the reins, and he will like all of us bear up under the endless stream of tragedies that await us.
And this is all true. Life is--looked at a certain miserable way--a series of tragedies withstood as we march heartbeat by heartbeat towards our dusty graves. But no other Shakespeare addresses this so flatly. The idea, that we must be ready at all times to die, is not unique even in Shakespeare. Hamlet says the "Readiness is all" while Edgar says, "The Ripeness is all", but with Hamlet it feels like a lost line. The Hamlet who sees "providence in the fall of a sparrow" and insists that there is "a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we may" in Act V doesn't feel like he has earned these grim realities. Edgar has. Edgar has seen his king bemaddened, his father blinded, his beloved brother turn on him, and has had his pride and power and position all stripped from him. Edgar can deliver convincingly the line that feels false from Hamlet's lips, and it's a grim stunner.
It's an apocalyptic vision and one only rarely tempered by comedy in this play. As such, for me at least, it's the most emotionally powerful Shakespeare play and maybe for me the only. Perhaps because I have treated them for so long as machines to be picked apart and examined and put back together, the bard's plays don't really have much punch for me emotionally. I pity Ophelia, I weep a bit for Juliet, I cringe for the MacDuff babes, but my heart just plain breaks for Lear. At play's end, when he (SPOILER) walks on stage with his only true daughter's corpse in his arms, asking for a glass to see if she is breathing, wishing with all he has that he could reclaim some of that liberating madness from Act III so as to escape reality, one can't but break. At least one can't but break when one has daughters. This play leaves me in pieces every single time.
Last thing to say: In the context of recently read plays (Antony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night, etc.), Lear reminds you that, when he took his time and revised, Shakespeare had no equals. None. The other plays, they're fine. They're plays. People perform them. But the gap between this work--which feels word by word and line by line like a masterpiece by which I mean he may have done no better in any other play by which I mean no one may ever have done better in any other play--and something like Antony is too wide to calculate.