Lear

September 18, 2017
At the outset of this pithy exegesis of King Lear, Bloom (Falstaff: Give Me Life) describes the play’s title character as, along with Hamlet, one of Shakespeare’s “most challenging personalities,” in part because “his violent expressionism desires us to experience his inmost being, but we lack the resources to receive that increasing chaos.” As in other books in his Shakespeare’s Personalities series, Bloom guides the reader scene by scene through the play, quoting long but well-chosen swaths of text and interjecting commentary that reveals the nuances of Shakespeare’s word choices—for example, repeated references to nature, natural, and the unnatural, whose ominous repetition throughout the text foreshadows the depths of degradation to which Lear and the other characters will descend by the play’s end. He is also deft at bringing out dramatic contrasts between characters, notably the juxtaposition of the Earl of Gloucester’s loyal but naive son Edgar and his devious “bastard” son Edmund, as well as parallels between characters—for example, between Lear and Gloucester, both of whom are betrayed by their children, or between Cordelia and the Fool, each of whom is chastised for speaking honestly. Bloom’s short, superb book has a depth of observation acquired from a lifetime of study, and the author knows when to let Shakespeare and his play speak for themselves. Agent: Glen Hartley, Writers’ Representatives.