Download PDF King Lear The Annotated Shakespeare William Shakespeare Burton Raffel Harold Bloom 9780300122008 Books

Product details Series The Annotated Shakespeare Paperback 215 pages Publisher Yale University Press; annotated edition edition (May 24, 2007) Language English ISBN-10 9780300122008 ISBN-13 978-0300122008 ASIN 0300122004

King Lear The Annotated Shakespeare William Shakespeare Burton Raffel Harold Bloom 9780300122008 Books Reviews

• The Tragedy of King Lear is a gem with keen insights into the ways that people can be superficial at their own peril and the peril of those they love. Unfortunately, I read the version. As with many books that involve formatting, the playscript was very difficult to follow due to erroneous breaks in the lines of text. Read King Lear as a physical book.
• This 'interpretation' alongside the original makes for much easier reading, while making the original so readily available also gives one the 'texture' of how the original felt. There is so much meaning and so much feeling contained in this play that the interpretation is essential unless one is able to interpret all the old English terms by oneself. So, I will certainly purchase further editions by this author's interpretations for more appreciation of the many plays of Shakespeare.
• Like I say about all Shakespeare the Arden versions are my favorite. I own about a third of the Canon in them already. The footnotes are my favorite parts about it, and they're great because I don't have to carry my Lexicon around everywhere.
  King Lear is a brilliant play, all around. Between the family ties, the love and lust, and just the crazy existential dialogue, it's just a great read all-around.
• This was helpful as a precursor to seeing a live production of the play, as it had been many years since I last read it. Shakespeare's language is, of course, beautiful, but it is also helpful to be able to glance at the "translation" to make sure I am really getting the meaning correctly.
• I'm a fan of the layout of Folger Shakespeare Library. The covers are also beautiful, but the play on the right, explanation of archaic terms on the left style is very helpful to the reader and makes getting into Shakespeare much easier.
  
  King Lear is a great tragedy. It is very enjoyable.
• King Lear is a brilliantly written tragedy. The characters were highly comp!ex and we'll drawn out. You can see the influence of Greek tragedies in William Shakespeare's writing. I would like to read again.
• The Arden Lear continues the high standard of Arden editions. The editing and annotating is erudite, thoughtful, and thorough. A very helpful volume for studying both the play and its context.
• The Modern Library/RSC Shakespeare series IS a very valuable addition. Inexpensive edition of the plays, helpful scene-by-scene summaries of the action, etc. But by far the most valuable part of the half dozen volumes I have studied is the "In Performance" sections. This is what sets this series apart from most others. Here, are performance histories detailing a variety of historic interpretations, interviews with contemporary directors and actors, revealing how they interpreted the text, and turned it into a stage drama.
  
  This Lear volume, unfortunately, is marred by the "temporally ethnocentric" and gross overemphasis upon the 1970 Peter Brook production, which perversely saw Lear as a Beckett or Brecht play. Instead of Shakespeare's profound, nuanced picture of a complex world of good and evil, with glimpses of transcendent, redeeming dimensions, we are given--as the proper touchstone to all future presentations--an absurdist, nihilistic vision of life, deliberately removing all affirmation of the worth of life, and of a distinction between good and evil! Hard to believe? Cf. pp. 166 ff. "Productions of Lear would {could?} never be the same after this." ??
  
  Even in this flawed volume, there is much to learn. And most of the other volumes I have studied in this series are not marred by such imbalanced "Mod" decadence. I hope the volume on TWELFTH NIGHT, with its gratuitous, stressed homosexualizing of several relationships, is not a sad omen for future volumes in the series.