Who Else Loves King Lear?

Thanks for the post, Lola - I confess I am, for now, all Leared out, so I won't be back for a bit - life has enough tensions in the working week to be going on with!

I will pop back in in a few days to see what hay has been made!

happy mowing.

When i arrived at University, i was handed a reading list, which told what i was to be expected to have read by the completion of my university career. With the exception of Emmanuel Kant, i'd read everything on the list before i was out of high school. Still haven't read Kant, and don't regret it.

I am in most respects, a rather dull-witted fellow. I take things as i find them, as they appear on the surface--as long as i'm not bitten, i'm content with that. Literary criticism, and especially the concepts of narrative cloture and structuralism always seemed to me areas of investigation ready-made for those who wished to justify tenure and continue to feed at the public trough while doing ****-all for their tax-paying employers. The wailing and gnashing of teeth at the University of Illinois when budget cuts were announced, and the tenured profs were told that everyone would be required to teach no fewer than three undergraduate sections was deafening.

But i'm content to be that dull-witted, and will remain so. After all, "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time"

I would agree with Craven about high school English. I always got A's too, and even got a few larfs by throwing some bad jokes into my assignments, like those useless "take this solliloquy and rewrite it in modern English" thingys. If I recall, my rewrite of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet began with:

Romeo: <honks horn which plays 'La Cucaracha'> Hey Joolie, my chiquita banana, where you at? We got a siesta to go to, babe! (still got an A)

I didn't study LitCrit until university, and found it a huge waste of time, despite quite liking the professor. However, most of us were more distracted by the details of his affair with our lovely Gothic Lit prof, the beautiful and infamous Maggie Kilgour, also rumoured to have slept with Harold Bloom while a student at Yale...

set

Those of us who've known you for a long time have had the opportunity to glimpse the quantity of typeset that has passed beneath your nasal bridge. Only an intellectual sort of bloke demonstrates the appetite for learning which you have shown since not long after your mom weaned you onto potato juice or whiskey or whatever fluid may have been handy. You are an asset here, and would be in any intellectual community.

Yet there is a pretense or a posture you adopt - as clear in the post above as I've seen it - where, though you have read (and thought about) often very difficult, sophisticated and abstract ideas, you demean your own accomplishments and perhaps even your own nature. You own an anti-intellectual rhetorical package which is utterly surprising.

You don't take things as they appear on the surface AT ALL. You dig down into everything - everything unKantian, we grant. This isn't a standard portrait of the 'practical man', out the door each morning in his wife-beater tshirt and carrying his plumbing tools in hand and hoping he might run into an egg sucking liberal in some alley. You did not, we note, enter a civil engineering program of studies, and any bridge you might construct utilizing the myriad of stuffs inside your noggin would almost certainly result in the deaths of dozens of mothers and children and soccer balls who'd just assumed their SUVs would actually make it across the river broiling far below.

We like you, though clearly, some german philosophers would think you a real weiner. And sure, some in the academic community slack off. Why should the bell curve not apply there? But who gives a toss? The best that comes out of those places, that vast body of knowledge and ideas which is more than fashion, constitutes much of what has sustained you.

"Ingratitude, thou marble hearted fiend
More hideous when thou show'st thee in a child
Than the sea-monster!"

Essay assignment: Note the water allusions in the preceding post. In 500 words, develop a thesis on why the author has chosen water, rather than, say, meat, to forward his narrative.

Given that those Germans started two world wars, who needs their philosophy (with apologies to the very nice Germans on our boards) Now that America has a new enemy (and leave us Canadians out of it) I think the Germans are forgiven, but nobody should be subjected to Kant....(with apologies to Redhorn).

I don't need 500 words to sum it up: A live sea monster is far scarier than sea monster steaks. Also, we can live without meat, but not water.

I happen to have similar feelings regarding academia to Set. As a teen I edited my mother's social work papers. At university, I found the quickest way to good grades was to just put a slight spin on the theses the professors were all defending. They were always willing to give the students a looksy at their latest theories if you feigned interest....some few years ago, life became more important to me than academia. I also hope that the 'dull-witted' comment by Set was complete sarcasm....

As for King Lear, I would agree, there is no redemption at the end, but I always saw that as the point...no 'deus ex machina' saving the day, we are ultimately responsible for our own future, so consider your decisions wisely.

OK Deb, but I hate it that you won't be back for a few days because I was looking forward to hearing your ideas about Lear. We won't be able to have a good discussion unless everyone is expressing their opinions. And perhaps it goes without repeating (we've all said it in one place or another), we need differences of opinion to do that. The discussion won't be the same without you.

I agree with everyone about the arrogance of some tenured (and some non-tenured) profs in college. But I'm a bit sympathetic with them in this respect (and only in this respect): it's very hard to maintain an analytic or relatively objective judgement when evaluating performance as a teacher. There is something so nice about people agreeing that it does create a bias of some kind no matter how well the teacher manages to achieve objectivity. However, it is the teacher's job to successfully fight bias as much as they can.

I once judged a debate at my children's high school. Well, I've done it often, actually but one episode stands out in my memory. A young woman and a young man were debating. I started out agreeing with the young man and I think actually I still agreed with him in the end, but I awarded the win to the girl because she had made the better argument. She had made me question my assumptions and I was not so sure anymore what my stand on the subject was. (bad sentence, I know but I'm in a hurry.) Can't develop that thought further right now. Must go. Back later.

Mr. BLatham: First, i thank you for your complimentary tone-flattery, plus $2.50 Can., will get you a ride cross town on TTC next time you're in Toronto. Secondly, when it comes specifically to literary criticism, i do consider myself dull-witted. There was a time when i felt differently, such as the days of my callow youth, when i entered university and took up a double-major in Lit and History. Those were simpler days, and the semioticians, then just nascent, had not yet polluted our playground with their dogmatic jargon. Modern literary criticism, with its structuralism, the phony psychological inferences which are the meat of semiotics, the emphasis on the rather insignificant issue of narrative cloture-all puts me rapidly to sleep. Heavy lidded, i nod and murmer: "Uh huh . . . i see . . . without doubt . . . " It is not for me, and i remain cheerfully dull-witted when it comes to literary criticism, particularly as it is practiced today.

I spent more than six years in the State Universities Civil Service System in Illinois. I saw many useful people employed by that system. By and large, the number of social parasites in the humanities far outweighed those in other, more practical areas, simply because those other areas generated ideas, systems, mechanisms, etc., for which there was ample practical application, by the very nature of the study. The value of supporting a large population of "thinkers" who invent their areas of concentration in order to justify their continued employment is much more questionable in the area of the humanities. The University of Illinois is a land-grant university, and it receives 100% of its operating budget (in the neighborhood of $5,000,000,000 per annum-a very toney neighborhood) from the state Assembly. Given that fact, it is not unreasonable to expect a little useful work out of those employed in the university system. Nevertheless, as i saw there, and at other universities where i was employed, before and since, there are a great many in the groves of academe who feel that their very self-promoted erudition is sufficient justification for their paycheck, and they deeply resent and loudly complain of the necessity to associate with the great unwashed undergraduate community. Perhaps this does not obtain north of the border, or perhaps it is better tolerated there than it is by me. I neither know nor care. Literary criticism, of which i was once enamoured, now bores me to tears. I don't absorb what i am told about it, and care less than the extent to which i absorb it. As so many others in this thread have noted, it is not an exciting or engrossing area of study--i don't know why you chose to object to my having said as much when others did so as well. I remain cheerfully dull-witted with regard to the topic, your disquisition notwithstanding.

Setanta,

Do you mean dull-witted? Because none of us (or it's hard to believe any of us) believe this to be the case. We can read and observe and I for one trust my judgement enough to decide there's nothing dull about you. As I read it, you're saying you don't agree with lit crit or with most literary critics in the way they go about it nowadays.

Clearly you have fresh ideas to offer this discussion. And I would like it very much if you would do so. If you're saying, and I must admit you do seem to speak in code sometimes, that you don't want to do it if we're going to get more caught up in the rules of lit crit than in discussion of the play, then I agree with you. I don't think I've read any comments here from anyone who would disagree, even though some of us got confused about what the other was saying and thought we were going to have a discussion about the rules rather than simply just doing it, so to speak.

I would like to do it (and I always do.) So if there are others who do as well, let's do it.

Cav,

I think that is the point as well. As we said earlier, it strikes me as a cautionary tale.

Maybe we could start with a clarification of what we're talking about, who disagrees with whom and why. Or maybe, we could just start now and move toward a discussion in which we're all a bit more clear about what we mean by what we say and take a bit more time to clarify before we disagree with each other. It can be done......I just know it can. But then I'm an optimist and refuse to believe in fate.

Lola, i largely mean what you have characterized--i am sick to death of the "rules" of literary criticism. But i mean more than that, as well. I began reading history more than 40 years ago, and on wise words from my grandmother (with her four years of elementary education), added Dickens, and Zola, and Austen, and Verne, and Cooper--in short, i discovered that literature is the meat which covers the scant bones of history. When at university, literary criticism was still the province of the simpler student of literature, who reads the text, adds a knowledge of the time and the life of the author, and then asks what the significance of the work was for those times and that author, and what, if any, is the significance of the work for those who read today. As i have noted, the 1960's was the period during which semi-idiotics was aborning, and the realm of literary criticism was about to be hijacked.

This requires some further explanation. I also decided to teach myself French when i was 13 years of age. By age 14, i was able to read French with almost the same facility as i do English. In all of my reading, English or French, history or literature, or simply popular novels, i have always done so to entertain myself--if i were to draw any lessons, it was as a purposeful act, after the fact of having read. Therefore, as an example, i recently read Peter the Great (a few years ago), by Robert Massie; i thoroughly enjoyed the writing, as the narrative flowed well, and Mr. Massie has a flare for descriptive language. I then more recently re-read the work, and enjoyed it again--although this time, i was reading to integrate this into what i know (or believe i know) about late 17th, early 18th century European politics, and the rise of the Russian empire, the sudden and dramatic collapse of the Swedish empire, and the beginning of the slow crumbling of the Osmanli (Turkish) empire.

I used to do as much with literature, especially with authors such as Dickens and Austen. Such authors entertain and inform, and their mastery of the language merits more than one reading. But my innnocent decision to learn French has undone me literarily. My spoken French is rather poor, in terms of accent and pronunciation; but my written French, and the ability to translate about as rapidly as you can speak, served to get me good employment as a bi-lingual secretary. In that capacity, i was able to take course in French, such as compostion and style, grammar, literary structure--both free of charge, and during working hours. I did so, both to improve my use of the language, and to get a break from the office. I did quite well in those courses, and came to hate literary analysis. Little French children not yet in pubescence are taught a formal style of literary analysis as a matter of course; comics in French pride themselves on the purity of their use of the language (hence, the wild popularity of the smurfs, originally a Belgian cartoon, which little children love because of the nonsense talk, and the "freedom" implicit in this "guilty pleasure"). The entire semiotics humbug, as well as structuralism, narrative cloture, deconstruction, derive from this obsession of the French with literary analysis. It has so spoiled my pleasure in literature, that i almost never read literature any longer, and usually read nineteenth century or earlier literature when i do. On the level of the semiotician i am dull-witted indeed--i don't get it, i don't want to get it, i revel in my dull-wittedness.

Yes, certainly we can discuss the play. As ought to be clear from an earlier post, i delight in Shakespeare's writing. I just don't want to do any analysis, and thought i'd show up here to make a little trouble and have a little fun. Now ain't i a bad man?

'Literary Criticism' just by it's very name indicates something negative....and 'analysis' starts with 'anal'....we should just start with 'impressions' and move on from there, and have a proper discussion of Lear. In the end, the message isn't as important as whether or not it moved you.

[size=7]So. Is there anyone who has read King Lear and would like to comment on what they liked, or didn't like, about it? Without analysis. [/size]

I like the lurid drama of the crazy old man wandering the mores, bewailing an unkind fate, which he had in fact drawn down upon his own head. I liked the usherette, too, but she slapped me.

I read the friggin' thing twice, and saw this Olivier film version in school, and on TV:

http://www.imdb.com/Title?0087561

However, I kinda wished I had seen this version (check out the cast):

http://www.imdb.com/Title?0076269

The then-future Benson and Star Trek: DS9 star as Edgar would have been worth it....and James Earl Jones, of course. Darth Vader as Lear....does it get better than that?

I have also seen Ran at least three times now....one of the most brilliant takes on the play of all time.

What I liked about the original was mainly that it was a bloody good read. There was another message in there too: Never trust the children who are willing to take money and/or property from you. They will screw you in the end.

If I haven't read the play itself, do I get to participate? Analysis (the psycho version) is the way I think, it's now a part of who I am, does that mean I can't comment? Or will my impressions, which are necessarily a part of who I am and what I've studied be acceptable? If not, I'll comment anyway. giggle.

I've read the Sparknotes, as I've said, and after Sept. 2, I'll read the whole damn play (I have several copies from my library sitting beside me here on the floor along with 7 years of notes in many notebooks on three patients for which I must write a 20 page summary of each of the entire analyses by Sept. 2) I've read other Shakespearean plays and seen several movies of Hamlet, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet (actually I've read this one too) and others, and the Tempest performed live on stage in New York in the East Village and I'm smart and know a lot about people. I know ******* nothing about lit crit. I audited a few English courses on the graduate level about 20 years ago and found it interesting until I came across a professor who was particular about these rules, and then I fired him too. The luxury of auditing a course is that you hold the power to dismiss the instructor if he or she doesn't hold up her end of the bargain or if they get snotty with you. hehehehe

I like the way the play depicts people as they are, at least as I'm familiar with them today. I've studied little history and am very happy to have Setanta along to bring us up to speed on that. (thanks Setanta for your explanations, very helpful). EhBeth has studied literature extensively and Deb, and Blatham will be assets for me in that they have studied the play extensively and have ideas..... of which I'm still eager to hear. Cav just simply knows everything and maintains his cool (it must be the ice carvings). I won't be commenting on what Shakespeare must have meant or intended to communicate however. I don't know enough about it to have an opinion. I'll just speak for myself. How's that?

I think I will comment, however on questions about the lessons that seem to be available in the play itself, if no one minds. But if they do, I'll do it anyway.

Keeping my cool is my business, as the average host/hostess I cater for tend to freak out, not realizing that the details are all taken care of :cool:

Throw away the notes, Lola. Read King Lear when you have a chance. Try to just read the first time. Enjoy it as literature. Don't forget that it is meant to be entertaining. If Shakespeare didn't think it would bring in the crowds, it might not have been written. So try to look at it that way to begin with.



edit - o.k. - i think this is funny - i always thought Groucho Marx said this -

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/s/sigmundfre125397.html


I think it fits rather nicely in this context.
I'll be laughing about this tomorrow.
Giving Groucho credit.

I always thought that was Magritte...oh wait, that was a pipe...

Lola has patients? Not for reading, it seems Just kidding my sweet....yes, we all know you are going to read the play, but if you are knackered, rent one of the movie versions (there are tons) or if you have an afternoon to spend in front of the tellie, rent Ran, then read the original, or vice versa, whatever is easier. All the notes are going to give you are a synopsis and someone's opinion. Shakespeare is too valuable to be treated like that Forget LitCrit....I don't know what sort of patients you have, but there is an interesting dichotomy between the servant who pretends to be mad, and Lear himself, who is truly mad...

Bah and humbug. Much of what has been written on Lear, very likely most of what has been written on Lear, predates the period you speak of Set. And one can turn to those, like Frye, who bring their own genius to Shakespeare, to our gain. I understand your distaste for much recent lit crit, I share it. Easy enough to ignore it. But it hasn't appeared on this thread.

That the plays were written for the stage and a London audience of, commonly, illiterates doesn't tell us all that much. It doesn't, for example, tell us that Shakespeare is comparable in aims and achievements to the Spice Girls. It really tells us nothing about what might be in the plays. Obviously, the fellow had to make a living and thus had to draw in the crowds, but the same holds true for modern film or music - a Dylan or a Cohen or a Dennis Potter or Kieslowski can pack so much into a line or a scene that multiple viewings or listenings or readings are rewarded. And then, one can read Pauline Kael on Kieslowski and have one's noggin expanded further.

I give up.