King Lear - 9781604138863

Based partially on a Celtic legend, King Lear stands among William Shakespeare's supreme achievements. Rivalrous siblings and their conflicted fathers take to the stage in this potent meditation on mortality and the limits of kinship and love. Introduced by scholar Harold Bloom, this new edition presents a selection of contemporary full-length essays offering a range of critical perspectives on a work that remains a pinnacle of Western drama.

Lear's sudden furies indeed are as startling as Yahweh's, and like Yahweh, Lear remains somehow incommensurate with us. Beyond the scale of everyone else in his drama, Lear is as much a fallen, mortal god as he is a king.---Harold Bloom

[P]erhaps the open structure of King Lear, as a play, reflects a human story that has no comprehensible start or finish but is part of a continuum....And the "sense of an ending," which gives significance to narratives, is gone.---Elizabeth Kraft

Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations, a series of more than 100 volumes, presents the best current criticism on the most widely read and studied poems, novels, and dramas of the Western world, from Oedipus Rex and the Iliad to such modern and contemporary works as William Faulkner's the Sound and the Fury and Don DeLillo's White Noise. Each volume opens with an introductory essay and editor's note by Harold Bloom and includes a bibliography, a chronology of the writer's life and works, and notes on the contributors. Taken together, Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations provides a comprehensive critical guide to the most vital and influential works of the Western literary tradition.