George Lopez
Cristiano
AP Literature Period 3a
November 12, 2014
Scholarly review on MacLean’s Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word Norman MacLean’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s King Lear is surprisingly clear when he uses the character of Lear to Represent the “love of craft” that is to be found in the play. His fascination of Shakespeare from a professor’s perspective was somewhat unreal, taking him two weeks to get through the ins and outs in the first scene of Hamlet. The way that he analyzed works pushed the ordinary limits, often times extending conversations to see why an author would do the smallest things, down to every single last piece of punctuation. The text as a whole would be rather difficult to describe in a compact manner,
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He differentiates the character Lear from those in previous works such as Hamlet and Othello, exclaiming that “King Lear is a tragedy in the course of which the protagonist becomes worth of being a tragic hero” and later identifies that Shakespeare intrigues us with the question of “whether the universe is something like what Lear hoped it was or very close to what he feared it was, is still, tragically the current question”. He maximizes the extremities by using the highest level or tragedy in his analyzing of the text, by using a tragic author, and a tragic character, he show’s how it developed into a tragic art. He expands on his argument when he points out the conversation between a ragged Edgar and a crazed Lear, two characters that are on the highest of spectrums in terms of craze and morality. At this point in the text Edgar has been disguised as Poor Tom and Lear has just identified his daughters Goneril and Regan for who they really are. Lear sees Edgar emerging from the corner of a hovel in a state of hysteria, when he says, “Hast thou given all to thy daughters, and art thou come to this?” Here we see Lear, the most prominent of all characters, speak rather broadly of a matter that is relatively important this early in the play. The vague word “this” at the end of Lear’s quote makes us rely on a term that epitomizes the universal subject that was brought up by MacLean at the beginning of the