num_pages: 192
description: Edward Bond's version of Lear's story embraces myth and reality, war and politics, to reveal the violence endemic in all unjust societies. He exposes corrupted innocence as the core of social morality, and this false morality as a source of the aggressive tension which must ultimately destroy that society. In a play in which blindness becomes a dramatic metaphor for insight, Bond warns that 'it is so easy to subordinate justice to power, but when this happens power takes on the dynamics and dialectics of aggression, and then nothing is really changed'.
language: English
title: Lear
titlecomplete: Lear (Student Editions)
genres: British Literature, School, Classics, Drama, English Literature, Plays, Retellings, Fiction, Theatre
ratings_count: 532
publisher: Methuen Drama