Shakespeares King Lear - A World too Cruel? :: King Lear essays

power Lear - A World in any case Cruel?       King Lear is at once the most highly praised and intensely criticized of all Shakespeares works. Samuel Johnson tell 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 mark with victory and felicity. Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, impertinent 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. Bradleys shrewdness is that King Lear is Shakespares 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 so had he taken the subject in hand a few years later....3   Many critics have sworn that the story is likewise fantastic and cruel to be true and that it should be viewed only as an allegory or fantasy. Yet Johnson called it a just representation of the leafy vegetable events of human life and C.J. Sisson has cited historical evidence from the lives of several men which tight resembled Lears division of his kingdom and tragic rejection by his daughters.   Despite its undeniable greatness, passim the last four centuries King Lear has left audiences, readers and critics alike emotionally tire and mentally unsatisfied by its conclusion. Shakespeare seems to have created a world too cruel and unmerciful to be true to life and too fill with horror and unrelieved suffering to be true to the art of tragedy. These diverging impressions arise from the fact that of all Shakespeares works, King Lear expresses human existence in its most universal aspect and in its profoundest depths. A psychological compendium of the characters such as Bradley undertook cannot by itself resolve or place in proper perspective all the elements which contribute to these impressions because t here(predicate) is much here beyond the normal scope of psychology and the conscious or unconscious(p) motivations in men.