King Lear has remained one of Shakespeare’s best works, and one of the best tragedies of all time, since the beginning of the 17th century; however, some early critics believe that certain elements of the story do not satisfy the criteria for a proper tragedy. The two plot elements under speculation are the subplot and the catastrophic ending. The primary focus of the story is set on the elderly King Lear, whose pride and greed blinds him, causing him to banish his only pure daughter, Cordelia, along with his most loyal subject, Kent. He bestows his power and land upon his ungrateful daughters Regan and Goneril, who immediately plot to strip him of the remainder of his power as well as his pride. A similar subplot emerges where the Earl of Gloucester is duped by his Don John-esque bastard son, Edmund, into banishing his real son, Edgar. Both fathers realize their misjudgments before the end, but not before their downfalls. The play ends with the gradual insanity and death of Lear, as well as the deaths of Cordelia, Regan, Goneril, Gloucester, and Edmund. The happy ending or “poetic justice” is never achieved and the only exception to the seeming lack of justice is the pronouncement of the loyal Edgar as King, and the inferred bright future.
The earliest record of a criticism of King Lear is a letter from the Irish playwright Nahum Tate to a friend, written in 1681. In the letter, Tate describes King Lear as “a Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht.” He describes in detail how he plans to rework several major elements of the story, adding a love affair between Edgar and Cordelia, rescuing Lear and Cordelia from execution, omitting The Fool (a source of wisdom as well as comic relief), and establishing “poetic justice” at the plays end. Tate proposes these changes in order to “rectifie what was wanting in the Regularity and Probability” of King Lear. He also reasoned that the audience would like a happy ending where justice and virtue prevailed. His reworking of the tale complies with the strict Neoclassical formula that was expected at the time. Tate’s predictions proved correct when his altered version overshadowed the original for over a century. (Tate 344-45) (SC2 92)
During the 18th Century, the controversy over the ending of King Lear continues as well as new controversy over Tate’s rewritten ending. Critic Joseph Addison...
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...s it unstoppable once it has been let loose. (Stampfer 3) The 20th century marked a period of speculation of the intent behind plot elements, specifically the ending. The style and structure of Shakespeare’s writing is no longer questioned as it is in earlier criticisms of King Lear.
King Lear is one of the most debatable plays ever written because the situations that arise are the result of the complex relationships between characters and the judgments that these characters make. The structure, especially the unexpected ending, is ahead of it’s time, and the meaning behind the ending is arguable. King Lear’s unique character relationships and structure are the reasons that it is still a popular topic in literary criticism.
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Price, Thomas “King Lear: A Study of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Method”
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The ending of King Lear is extremely intense and depressing. There are deaths on both sides, both bad and good characters. Although Shakespeares gives the reader many notions of hope and morality, these glimpses were short lived and rarely ended well. They are used merely to allow for harsher realities and intenser savagery. Shakespeare uses these glimpses of morality to keep the reader hoping and believing in a the potential for a good outcome. In the end however the illusion fades and there is no hope left.
Some people multitask unconsciously in their life, but unconscious multitask does not mean an inappropriate action because situations might require them to do unconsciously. Videos, prints, radios, gaming formats allow people to multitask a lot (Purcell & Rainie, 2014). People in workplaces they have so many opportunities to multitask; for example, people might listen to radios from their computers while they print papers out. In our developed society, there are no days which we avoid multitasking. Americans were gaining 100,500 words per day in 2008 (Purcell & Rainie, 2014). Multitasking enables people to have the amount of the words, and they must have a lot of information. Although some people might think that technology prevents people from doing good performance. According to Carr (2010), the net makes people have constant distractions and interruptions. The user of internet can definitely have a lot of information and use helpful tools for learning. If we are able to have a lot of information by multitasking, we are able to have various kinds of knowledge. In a classroom, we might see some people who type on laptops while they listen to a teacher. As an experiment at Stanford University, 49 people who did often multitask performed less than 52 people who avoided multitasking (Carr, 2010, 50). In fact, the 49 people were supposed to multitask heavily, but we do not need to have multitasking heavily, and what we
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. As reprinted in Elements of Literature. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1990.
King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. It is a play that portrayed a world too cruel and unmerciful to be true to life. It is a play filled with endless horror and unrelieved suffering. However, in this environment, Shakespeare expresses human existence in its profound depth. He examines the motivation of the characters’ actions and the future consequences of their irrational thoughts. In the play, Shakespeare illustrates King Lear’s development as a tragic hero driven by emotion to a character of rational thoughts with the help of his reasonable daughter, Cordelia, and the contrast of the ambiguous Edmund. In the play, Shakespeare analyzes the characters’ emotional needs and their ability to resolve their problems with rational actions. He shows the consequences of acting rashly and irresponsibly through the sufferings of King Lear. He explores the struggle for power and the emotional need of a tired king. He created a play that illustrated the needs of reason and emotion for a human being.
Christine Rosen, editor of The New Atlantis and the author of “The Myth of Multitasking,” explains how technology in the modern world has allowed people the ability to constantly multitask, at the same time, exposing the human body to negative long-term effects of the body. Nowadays, people are constantly on the run trying to finish their daily tasks. In order for this to happen, they multitask in order to accomplish their activities. Not only do humans incorporate multitasking in their own lives, they also are found doing this at their jobs. Jobs require their workers to multitask especially through the use of technology. Aditionally, multitasking has been known to be dangerous in the work field as well as while driving. Workers are found to be worn down by intense multitasking. Because of this, people should minimize the use of multitasking in order to avoid health problems. Furthermore, research has been conducted on multitasking by fMRI scans to find out the effects multitasking has on the brain. The effects that were found is memory loss caused by stress through multitasking. In addition, research has also shown that people have a hard time learning while multitasking, therefore, they learn less. Due to this reason, children is greatly impacted because constant
Brown reveals in these simple depictions an understanding of King Lear that far surpasses anything the critics had to say about a play that was not at all popular in the nineteenth century. Charles Lamb observed early in the century that "Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage," and at the end of the century--as in, for example, a review of Sir Henry Irving's King Lear at the Lyceum Theatre--the critics were still quoting Lamb and asserting that King Lear "would not be tolerated for an hour if produced without the name of Shakspere" (Illustrated London News 101:637). Small wonder that Sir Henry Irving was reportedly nervous and anxious when he produced this unpopular play at the Lyceum in 1892.
8 Kiernan Ryan, 'King Lear: The Subversive Imagination' in New Casebooks: King Lear, ed. Kiernan Ryan, Macmillan 1993, p.80
To understand this better, a research study was conducted by Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass and Anthony Wagner, to see the results on cognitive control in media multitaskers. Firstly, they gave a two hundred sixty-two university
Peter Brook’s film production of King Lear was followed by diverse critical opinion. W. Chaplin (1973) deemed the production as a dramatic failure due to its violent nature; however, W. Johnson (1972) conversely praises the “bursts of exaggerated violence” which he claims, leads successfully to the establishment of the production’s atmosphere. Through both these views we see violence as being central to interpreting Brook’s King Lear. In a similar fashion, Anne Bradby (2004) described Shakespeare’s Lear as having an “atmosphere of unparalleled rapine, cruelty, and bodily pain” as central to its plots and themes (a theme also touched on by other critics such as G. Orwell (1947), and W. Knight (1949)). From this, we see that interpreta-tions of King Lear benefit from an examination of violence. In order to show how Brook estab-lishes his distinguishing atmosphere of violence, I am going to explore the presentation of vio-lence, the destruction of compassion, and the reactions to both of these key aspects of the pro-duction.
... for example critic Paul Kahn assesses the legal implications of King Lear, from the division of the kingdom where he explores the incompatibility of the value of love with the laws of the state, to the political and psychological implications of the actions of the play on the characters, speculating that his madness had commenced from Act 1 rather than later on in Act3 during the storm. It is evident that Shakespeare uses the embodiment of the idealised family as a foil to the insanity of each protagonist, as they reject the nurturing nature of what the family is supposed to be and do the opposite solely after their own selfish desires. Tragically, neither protagonists were free their families prohibited their social growth and Shakespeare allows them only to be in unison through death. Philosophically, they are more of a family in death than when they were alive.
King Lear is at once the most highly praised and intensely criticized of all Shakespeare's works. Samuel Johnson said it is "deservedly celebrated among the dramas of Shakespeare" yet at the same time he supported the changes made in the text by Tate in which Cordelia is allowed to retire with victory and felicity. "Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of chronicles."1 A.C. Bradley's judgement is that King Lear is "Shakespare's greatest work, but it is not...the best of his plays."2 He would wish that "the deaths of Edmund, Goneril, Regan and Gloucester should be followed by the escape of Lear and Cordelia from death," and even goes so far as to say: "I believe Shakespeare would have ended his play thus had he taken the subject in hand a few years later...."3
Happiness is a common emotion that provides a positive and lifted lifestyle. Many people think happiness is handed around, that happiness comes from a lucky draw in life, as if it was a game. However people actually choose to be happy by living and thinking in a positive way that creates happiness for them.
What is happiness? An emotion of encouragement towards life. There have been many heated discussions about whether or not money buys happiness. These opinions, of course, are derived from how people define happiness. If a person’s basic needs are met, life can be much easier without worrying about money. It is only when these needs are met that one can focus on the true meaning of life. So then the question becomes: What is your definition of happiness? Happiness is not based on your checkbook but based on internal beliefs and attitudes. So as long as your basic needs are met, there is opportunity to discover happiness.
Shakespeare, William, Barbara A. Mowat, and Paul Werstine. The Tragedy of King Lear. New York: Washington Square, 1993. Print.
In today’s society, technology use has increased rapidly, and the need for multitasking correlates with that. Multitasking is the ability to perform well at two or more jobs at the same time (Van der Horst et al. 434). Technology is ever growing, and the ability to multitask has become more apparent. The need to understand multitasking has only recently become a topic of importance (Van der Horst et al. 434). Van der Horst mentions that with the quantity of technologies people have access to like email, instant messaging, and smart phones, people deal with multiple sources of information at once all the time (Van der Horst et al. 434). On average, people spend three minutes on a task and when technology is involved, only two