San Antonio College Library

I am attempting a rather full, and I hope fresh, study of Lear's self-discovery, its intellectual meaning, and its dramatic expression. I shall try to show, in small part, what self-knowledge meant to Shakespeare's contemporaries and, most important, how he struck out on his own, and with insights well beyond his time, to create perhaps the greatest drama of self-discovery in all literature. - Introduction.

King Lear is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare. It tells the tale of a king who bequeaths his power and land to two of his three daughters, after they declare their love for him in a fawning and obsequious manner. His third daughter gets nothing, because she will not flatter him as her sisters had done.

Robert L. Belknap's theory of plot illustrates the active and passive roles literature plays in creating its own dynamic reading experience. Literary narrative enchants us through its development of plot, but plot tells its own story about the making of narrative, revealing through its structures, preoccupations, and strategies of representation critical details about how and when a work came into being. Through a rich reading of Shakespeare's King...

Veteran actor Christopher Plummer delves into one of the greatest tragedies - King Lear. Exploring the power and ethics of authority, King Lear is considered to be one of the most penetrating plays of the human psyche ever written. Plummer considers the original source material - the 8th Century King Leir - and asks why Shakespeare reworked it to give a much bleaker ending, going against dramatic conventions of the day.

Publisher's description: In its timeless exploration of familial and political dissolution, and in its relentless questioning of the apparent moral indifference of the universe, King Lear is Shakespeare's darkest tragedy. It is also one of his most timely, for many of the issues it raises resonate loudly within our own era. Perhaps because of its contemporary relevance, it is one of Shakespeare's most frequently produced, taught, and studied works....