Essays on Lear

Shakespeare’s tragedies are based on the culmination of the recklessness of his protagonists. For example, suspicion was the major cause of Othello’s downfall; Pride was the cause behind King Lear’s tragedy. As said by Aristotle, the protagonist’s weakness is the major reason for the tragedy to happen in the play. Shakespeare’s plays are based on the concept of Aristotle’s tragedy. The tragic hero according to Corrigan (206) is the good man who faces trouble due to his errors or shortcomings. The shortcomings or errors are the real motivators behind the action of the ...

Introduction

Akira Kurosawa's Ran is based on the 16th Century play, King Lear, by William Shakespeare. The main plots behind the two works are identical. Besides Ran’s adapted parallel characters like Hidetora, there are theme similarities and differences. In both stories, a leader decides to divide his kingdom among three heirs and a child identifies their father’s undoing in both. The similarities and differences in the plots of the two works underpin major similarities and differences in themes. For example, both works capture the theme of conflict between authority and challenge within the family albeit not exactly in ...

Everything new is well-forgotten old. This saying is true concerning any aspect of culture. Humanity evolves together with civilization and each century, every decade brings new ideas, forms and notions. The movement of postmodernism brought a lot of artists, who tried to bring in music, theatre and literature something new. But very often their new creations just evoke some ideas from the cultural legacy of other artists – the characters, plots and themes repeat in different variations. The play “Endgame” written by Samuel Beckett – an Irish avant-garde theatre director, playwright, and novelist, one of the founders of the Theatre of ...

In King Lear Shakespeare demonstrates the consequences of our actions in the in a few ways. In the first act King Lear, who is old wants to divide his kingdom between his daughters Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. He decides that he will give out portions of land according to who loves him the best “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?/ That we our largest bounty may extend? Where nature doth with merit challenge” (Shakespeare I.I. 50-52). Both Regan and Goneril are more than willing to profess their love for him even though they are lying. ...

Shakespeare wrote King Lear in the early 1600’s during a time that England was experiencing a social change. Much of this upheaval was caused by the continual shift in religion between Catholicism and Protestantism. Each shift brought with it persecution and death. King Lear was written during a time when the monarchy was the center of the kingdom. James I of England, VI of Scotland who was the king when King Lear was written felt that the powers of a king should be absolute as the position was given by divine right. This caused a number of problems ...

Freud's Account of Human Sexuality and Human Desire

Basically, psychoanalysis and Freud's theories are associated with his theory of sexuality, considering that he regarded all aspects of human life (i.e. beginning with a simple mental disorder up to religious doctrines), as the sexual problems. This comic effect arises also because the question of what Freud used to call sexuality remains outside the attention. If one examines the issue of human sexuality in the works of Freud in detail, the work of sensual sphere and sphere of desires becomes evident. The phenomenon of Freud, the author of the doctrine of psychoanalysis, is that he was the first to ...