Reading in Original version a Shakespeare play was in my mind a kind of challenge. I read quite a few of Shakespeare's plays in the past, but they were translated in French. I had heard so much about Shakespeare's wonderful style, the beautiful English language he used that I wanted to read it. I chose King Lear because I did not want to discover in English a play I had already read, and also because I was told that King Lear might be the most "powerful", the darkest but also the one in which the human behaviors were depicted in the most astonishing way. I wanted to discover in which way King Lear was this exceptional. I chose to read an original version of the text and I was quite surprise, I did not find it so difficult to read, to adapt to the syntax; actually, English syntax from the 17th century seems to me not so different from nowadays' one as expected; once you have assimilated some words and found their modern equivalent (above all the "-th-" words and the past tense), it is quite easy to understand the way the sentence is built.
[...] In spite of the difficulty to understand some parts of the play, I am happy to have overcome it and to have managed to catch the pleasure of reading Shakespeare in his own words. King Lear, a kind of magic A legend, a genius, a controversy King Lear was written in 1605 and is now considered as one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies. The story is based on a pre-Christian Britain's legend. The playwright transformed and developed the original story, gave it a tragic ending, had a new plot and news characters. [...]
[...] Although he was banished by the King when he advocated for Cordelia, he decides to remain loyal to his great King becoming old and disguises himself as a simple gentleman, to “remain the true blank of thine (Act I,1). He is in fact what the King should have been and make Lear see the reality of his sister's behavior, and manages to make Lear recover his senses, his fair daughter and his throne at the end of the play, just before Lear's death. [...]
[...] To sum up, King Lear and the characters talk about nature as making us care about one another although Edmund and other characters considers that nature makes us care only about ourselves. In the end, you are left with a strange and disturbing uncertainty: the villains are defeated and dead, but the goods are not victorious, they are mainly also dead. There is goodness in the world of King Lear, but there is also madness and death, and it is difficult to tell which triumphs in the end. Conclusion With this marvelous experience of reading Shakespeare in his own words, I can only regret that I am [...]
[...] Once I had clearly understood who is who, I felt involved in the story, choosing my favorite characters, hoping for the victory of one over another and surprised by the reversals Shakespeare offers. I want to present here the characters I find the most interesting. King Lear is also a picture and a thinking about human behavior. I will introduce some of the themes tackled there. Edmund, bastard son to Gloucester, is in my mind the best example of the differences between a Shakespeare's play and what I read before. [...]
[...] Sometimes, without understanding the whole meaning of the paragraph, some lines were striking by their rhythms or rhymes. Most of the play is written in a beautiful prose, but the lines in verses used by the author to emphasize some speeches and to give them a moral or prophetic weight are really marvelous. Here I can give some example of this kind of “magic lines”: A credulous father! and a brother The weight of this sad time we noble, must obey; Whose nature is so far from doing Speak what we feel, not what we harms, ought to say. [...]
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