Things I didn't know I didn't know: Shakespeare edition

[gwendally]

When I was a teenager I was gifted a big leather bound folio of Shakespeare's works. I loved reading it the way other people read romance novels. I thoroughly enjoyed the witty insults and the comedies, and got a sense of history from the tragedies. I read a LOT of the plays, maybe 80%. You'll find me unusually well-educated in things Shakespearian

Comments

[pondhopper]

Lear is a true tragedy but as real as life. It's also one of the hardest to teach as I found out when I taught Shakespeare courses at the college level. Of course, teaching is a euphemism for showing students how to actually read Shakespeare and how to draw as much life from his works as possible. So much life! I also found that it is a play you can read first and enjoy more when you see it on stage...it is often the opposite.
I'm glad you got to Lear and it's never too late!

[crazyburro]

poor Cordelia.

Fortunately your kids are not like Lear's.

I have never seen it in the theatre.

[gwendally]

Oh, that line Goneril has about letting him bear the consequences of his own bad decisions? That's definitely something my own firstborn daughter would say. I mean, they didn't know how bad the storm would be, or how STUPID he'd be without his 100 men to keep him in check.

I know from reading ahead that she gets worse, but at the halfway mark she just flattered the old man who wanted to be flattered and put her foot down at his 100 men assaulting her female servants. Nothing at all evil. Her father is a cross she has to bear and she is conspiring with her sister to give him some boundaries. I chat with my own sister once a week or so without getting anyone murdered myself.

[emjsea]

I'm usually not big on the tragedies, but I do love Lear.

[ghost_light]

Just randomly popping in to say King Lear is my very favorite! And there are all sorts of strange rabbit holes there, if you care to look. Like the Fool and Cordelia don't appear on stage together so there was a trend/theory for a while that those roles should be played by the same person.

[gwendally]

I was discussing this with my husband on our noontime walk: Shakespeare does a LOT with people not recognizing each other. In this play alone there's Kent not being recognized once he changes his clothes (but not his voice, stature or attitude) and Edgar not being recognized when he takes off his glasses and clothes. How would Cordelia be able to pass messages to Kent incognito from France? I suspect she was supposed to be disguised as the Fool. This staging doesn't do that. In fact, there was a really disquieting scene where the Fool is dispatched (it made no sense to me and I was really bugged by it until I realized it was just peculiar to this production of it.)

I've always wondered if the ability to not recognize someone when they change their clothes is actually an Elizabethan THING (bad glasses, maybe?) or just a conceit allowed by the audiences, like stormtroopers not being able to hit anything.

[ghost_light]

The mistaken identity trope is endemic with Shakespeare comedies, but forms a very significant theme in Lear (which I won't spoil until you see the end.)

Yeah, textually (and I am going from memory) Lear tells the Fool to sleep after the storm scene and then he's just...gone. Never seen or mentioned again.

How far are you in the play?

[gwendally]

Gloucester has had his eyes put out and is heading for Dover with "Poor Tom".

As someone who has a poor memory for faces - I cannot tell people's faces apart very easily, or identify the same person by face if they change their hair - I don't use faces to identify people hardly ever. How they walk, their coloring, their attitude, their voice... there's no way that I couldn't grab my 28 year old son's arm and not know it was him. Especially if blind.

[siglinde99]

I read Lear in high school. I don't know if I ever read it again, but it is one of the few things from high school English that burned into my brain. I loved it.