King Lear (Rsc Shakespeare) (The Pelican Shakespeare) (Shakespeare Workshop S.)

by William Shakespeare

Professor Cedric Watts (Editor), Dr Keith Carabine, Cedric Watts (Editor), and Keith Carabine

Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex.

The Wordsworth Classics’ Shakespeare Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare’s works. The textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal.

King Lear has been widely acclaimed as Shakespeare’s most powerful tragedy. Elemental and passionate, it encompasses the horrific and the heart-rending. Love and hate, loyalty and treachery, cruelty and self-sacrifice: all these contend in a tempestuous drama which has become an enduring classic of the world’s literature. In the theatre and on screen King Lear continues to challenge and enthral.

This Wordsworth edition of King Lear provides a comprehensive, integrated text of the play.

• ISBN10: 1853260959
• ISBN13: 9781853260957
• Publish Date: 5 March 1994 (first published 1 January 1920)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Wordsworth Editions Ltd
• Edition: New edition
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 176
• Language: English

Reviews

[Linda]

I think this was the darkest, and most disturbing of the three Shakespearian tragedies I have read this semester! Although both Titus and Othello also have a lot of violence and darkness, King Lear has two elaborate plots, two families that are being thorn up from the inside, and fathers who suddenly appear to not know their children, and start judging their children in a different way than before.

The turmoil this creates, and the utter darkness that follows is almost painful, and the whole story unfolds with excrutiating details of violence towards two old, fragile men.

[angelarenea9]

A fairly quick read. I didn't love it as much as I remember. Lear was way obsessed with 'nature' and the whole thing was so pompous. But not as bad as some of his other stuff.