Title: Lear : the great image of authority /
Authors: Bloom, Harold
Year: 2018
Subjects: Lear,; Shakespeare, William,; Lear,; King Lear (Shakespeare, William); Kings and rulers in literature; LITERARY CRITICISM Shakespeare.; LITERARY CRITICISM Renaissance.; LITERARY CRITICISM Drama.; Kings and rulers in literature
Abstract: "Harold Bloom, regarded by some as the greatest Shakespeare scholar of our time, presents an intimate, wise, deeply compelling portrait of King Lear--the third in his series of five short books about the great playwright's most significant personalities, hailed as Bloom's "last love letter to the shaping spirit of his imagination" on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. King Lear is perhaps the most poignant character in literature. The aged, abused monarch--a man in his eighties, like Harold Bloom himself--is at once the consummate figure of authority and the classic example of the fall from majesty. He is widely agreed to be William Shakespeare's most moving, tragic hero. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Lear with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Emma Bovary or Hamlet when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding--over the course of his own lifetime--of Lear, so that this book also explores an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity. Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare's characters make. He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy, pathos, and clarity in Lear"--
Contents: Every inch a king -- Meantime we shall express our darker purpose -- Thou, nature, art my goddess -- Now thou art an o without a figure -- O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! -- Poor Tom / that's something yet: Edgar I nothing am -- O heavens! / if yourselves are old, / make it your cause -- This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen -- He chided as I fathered. / Tom, away -- He that will think to live till he be old, / give me some help! -- But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee, / life would not yield to age -- Humanity must perforce prey on itself, / like monsters of the deep -- O ruined piece of nature, this great world / shall so wear out to naught -- Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound / upon a wheel of fire -- Men must endure / their going hence even as their coming hither. / ripeness is all -- The gods are just and of our pleasant vices / make instruments to plague us -- We that are young / shall never see so much, nor live so long.