What Do You Like To Read?

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

Here’s a question that I hope can draw some discussion.  I try to post a wide variety of topics here – interesting links, news items, book/movie reviews, discussion of the plays.  What do you like to read the most? Are you here to discuss the plays?  Or hear news about the latest Shakespeare book or movie?  Do you follow the links when I post them?  Which stories are you most likely to comment on? Just curious.  I looked at my admin console today and saw that I’ve posted almost 600 entries here, but then I realized they spread across a wide spectrum of content, so I’m a bit curious about whether I should focus a little more on something over something else.

Which Tragedy Is The "Most" Tragic?

~ duane ~ 14 Comments

While listening to the In Our Time episode about King Lear, I started thinking about the emotional impact of the tragedies.  They are not created equal.  Which one “gets” you, the most?  Which one tears out your heart and stomps on it?  Has the answer changed for you in the past? For me, right now, King Lear would be the clear winner.  The whole “Daughter tries and fails to save the father, father tries and fails to save the daughter” storyline just crushes me.  And it’s easy to see why — I have daughters.  When I tell them the story I simply tell it as “And then Cordelia comes back to rescue her Daddy from the forest.”  And they are happy with that ending, it pleases them that the daughters can save the daddy.  So the fact that I know what comes next makes it that much more heart-wrenching.  I’ve been in the discussion with parents about when children should learn what happens to Bambi’s mother, but never at what age they should learn Cordelia’s fate ;). Fifteen or twenty years ago, I would have said Hamlet.  Because I was the typical angsty/emo college kid doing the whole “What does life really mean?” thing.  I had a fascination with last words, dying moments, and that idea of drawing a line between “Ok, here you’re alive, and then over here, you’re dead, and right now you’re standing on the line, what do you do?”  So if you’d asked me back then, I would have told you that it was the “Flights of angels sing thee sweetly to thy rest” line that did it for me. But you know what?  Life is better now :).  When you step back from Hamlet you have to admit that he pretty much put himself in that situation in the first place.  It’s sad that he died, of course, but it’s not tragic for me in the same sense as a Cordelia, who really tried to do the right thing from beginning to end and still ended up dead.  Or Ophelia, who never really stood a chance. The others just really don’t do much for me, emotion-wise.  Sure it’s sad that Romeo and Juliet couldn’t live happily ever after, but happily ever after is a thing for fairy tales.  Then again, much like the Hamlet -> King Lear thing, maybe if you’d caught me back as a teenager in love, maybe I would have said R&J.  Who knows? This topic makes me want to go read Anthony and Cleopatra again, I haven’t read that one in a long time and I’m thinking I might find it better now (being married, and far from a teenager) than I did when I was in high school. Who’s next?

In Our Time : King Lear

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

Thanks to Alayne for this link to Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time where they’re apparently discussing King Lear: Melvyn Bragg explores the dramatic themes and history behind one of
Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, “King Lear”. He is joined by Jonathan
Bate, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick;
Katherine Duncan-Jones, Tutorial Fellow in English at Somerville College,
Oxford; and Catherine Belsey, Research Professor in English at the
University of Wales, Swansea. The date on the file suggests that this is the newest episode of the show.  I often subscribe to In Our Time’s podcast feed, but then I fall behind because they hit on some topics I’m just not interested in and eventually I give up.  I’m glad when readers send me good stuff like this that I might otherwise have missed! Downloading now….