Interpretation of William Shakespeare's King Lear

"Bernard Shaw would claim that [such a performer] couldn't satisfy Shakespeare's characters but only versions of himself, and that he used Shakespeare's texts as unadulterated quaries for the makings of original romantic dramas in which to exhibit characters of his own trigger" (Shattuck 1810). Lear's rant at the storm was treated as the attribute - and cliche - of Romantic heroism fighting unbeatable odds:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage, blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench'd our steeples, [drown'd] the cocks!

You sulph'rous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my neat head! (III, i, 1-6)

Upon such a stage the Lear myth play well, if not the play per se: that of the old warrior fighting against the wickedness of filial and political betrayal. The mythic version, in fact, found much favor with the likes of such literary giants as Leo Tolstoy than did Shakespeare's text (Kermode 1250). It was a very "Sturm un Drang" (Storm and Stress) interpretation; which is not surprising since the founders of love story in the late 1700s took Shakespeare as one of their models.

In the straight-laced literary view, Shakespeare's plays were viewed more in terms of melodrama or, at best, " blemish" attempts at tragedy; certainly Lear does not stay at bottom the boundaries of the classic "Unities" of Time, Place

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. In The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974, 1255-1305.

While the psychoanalytical approach to version Shakespeare took root in the 1920s (and still plays an integral graphic symbol in contemporary production), in the wake of World struggle II atrocities and the ensuing Cold War geo-political absurdities, an existentialist philosophical system has infused contemporary interpretation as well. It is a position best voiced by dramatic theorist Jan Kott in his creative work Shakespeare Our Contemporary, wherein plays such as Lear are defined in terms of metaphorical function and the human condition (Snyder 297). Professors Daniel Krempel and throng Clay offer this interpretation of Kott's approach in The representation Image (22):

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