Lisa's Reviews > King Lear

In times of change, stress or general uneasiness, I find myself repeatedly quoting Shakespeare.

There is something soothing in the knowledge that he wrote all those unforgettable lines over 400 years ago and they still make so much sense - sometimes more sense than our most recent literary production. I know that I am in some kind of identity crisis when King Lear comes to my mind again, and I open the highly impractical "Collected Works of Shakespeare" and try to find Lear without completely breaking the suffering spine.

“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”

That was the quote I had in my head, and I found it quickly enough following my post-it signs, but of course, Shakespeare being the magician that he is, he lures me into his world, and I find myself rereading major parts of the whole play. It does not necessarily make me forget my everyday worries, for Shakespeare is no escapism writer. Rather, I feel that my concerns and thoughts are given a wider, noble context, as they can be related to that master of words, plots, characters, everything human. Shakespeare does not give me answers, but he gives my questions validity.

"I am a man more sinned against than sinning" - who doesn't want to yell out those famous words of King Lear's every once in a while? And they might be true. But does that really excuse the sinning? I love the ambiguous world of Shakespeare, and King Lear has it all. Action, drama, feelings in the wrong and right places, politics, and common sense in unexpected situations. The long diatribe on man's blaming the stars for his viciousness is one of my favourites.
King Lear is as good as Shakespeare can be!

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit
of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star.”