When I was trying to reflect on what insightful comments or ideas we discussed in class, only one stuck out in my mind. I forget who brought up the topic to begin with, but I remember discussing the relationship between King Lear and Edgar. During the discussion, a few important observations were made, leading us to establish several conclusions:
1. Lear is actually going mad, while Edgar is only pretending
2. Lear benefits from seeing aspects of himself (or who he is becoming) reflected in Edgar
3. Edgar benefits when Lear looks after him
While these points may seem obvious, organizing them like this really helped me understand the Lear/Edgar relationship better. I think these observations show Shakespeare's brilliance with character development and contrast.
This also connects to another good point of the week, which was one of Mr. Allen's. He said something to the effect of, "As writers, we always want to look after our characters, make sure they take the right path. To be a good writer, you have to let go and see where the characters take you."
I think Shakespeare did exactly that. He probably didn't map out all this madness beforehand, but since that's where the story took him, he decided to place characters in Lear's path that would help him see who or what he was turning into. This is only one of the thousands of reasons Shakespeare is still considered some sort of literary god.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment