03-30-2019, 11:21 PM
There are two versions of Lear, btw: the old one with a lot of extraneous and inconsistent bits of dialogue, and the one Shakespeare himself provided for a more literary audience. I don't mind 'unnatural situations' (I'm guessing the storm is your prime example, as well as all the things with Gloucester) because realism should *not* be the be-all end-all of drama, while overblown dialogue I think is more a matter of taste -- the 'bigness' of its dialogue, and whether it's a touch too big to be tasteful, is for the individual reader to judge, but I'd venture to say that the reader who either misses or ignores the emotional impact, not only of the events but of the dialogue through which those events are conveyed, is a bit of a fool.
I do sort of agree that it's a touch overblown, but more in the sense of its dialogue than the situations or the play as a whole -- reading it, I'm sometimes exhausted, not just by all the emotions it induces in me, but also by Shakespeare's style. Here I am, preferring the far juicier dialogue of Hamlet, the brutal force of Macbeth, or the high strangeness of Troilus. If anything, I think those three tragedies make it to greatness, Macbeth for developing the nihilist archetype, Hamlet for giving birth to psychoanalytic intelligence, and for Troilus for being a sharp imitation of the encyclopedic nature of life.
I do sort of agree that it's a touch overblown, but more in the sense of its dialogue than the situations or the play as a whole -- reading it, I'm sometimes exhausted, not just by all the emotions it induces in me, but also by Shakespeare's style. Here I am, preferring the far juicier dialogue of Hamlet, the brutal force of Macbeth, or the high strangeness of Troilus. If anything, I think those three tragedies make it to greatness, Macbeth for developing the nihilist archetype, Hamlet for giving birth to psychoanalytic intelligence, and for Troilus for being a sharp imitation of the encyclopedic nature of life.