Free Kindle King Lear: BBC Dramatization (BBC Radio Presents) ebooks Download
A king foolishly divides his kingdom between his scheming two oldest daughters and estranges himself from the daughter who loves him. So begins this profoundly moving and disturbing tragedy that, perhaps more than any other work in literature, challenges the notion of a coherent and just universe. The king and others pay dearly for their shortcomings–as madness, murder, and the anguish of insight and forgiveness that arrive too late combine to make this an all-embracing tragedy of evil and suffering.Each Edition Includes:• Comprehensive explanatory notes • Vivid introductions and the most up-to-date scholarship • Clear, modernized spelling and punctuation, enabling contemporary readers to understand the Elizabethan English• Completely updated, detailed bibliographies and performance histories • An interpretive essay on film adaptations of the play, along with an extensive filmographyFrom the Paperback edition.
Series: BBC Radio Presents
Audio CD
Publisher: Random House Audio; Abridged edition (November 1, 1994)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0553455389
ISBN-13: 978-0553455380
Product Dimensions: 4.9 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #1,381,429 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #42 in Books > Books on CD > Authors, A-Z > ( S ) > Shakespeare, William #136 in Books > Books on CD > Poetry & Drama #158 in Books > Books on CD > Literature & Fiction > Poetry
One of the things you can assume when you write about Shakespeare--given the hundreds of thousands of pages that have already been written about him in countless books, essays, theses and term papers--is that whatever you say will have been said before, and then denounced, defended , revised and denounced again, ad infinitum. So I'm certain I'm not breaking any new ground here. King Lear, though many, including David Denby (see Orrin's review of Great Books) and Harold Bloom consider it the pinnacle of English Literature, has just never done much for me. I appreciate the power of the basic plot--an aging King divides his realm among his ungrateful children with disastrous results--which has resurfaced in works as varied as Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres (see Orrin's review), and Akira Kurosawa's last great film, Ran. But I've always found the play to be too busy, the characters to be too unsympathetic, the speeches to be unmemorable and the tragedy to be too shallow. By shallow, I mean that by the time we meet Lear he is already a petulant old man, we have to accept his greatness from the word of others. Then his first action in the play, the division of the kingdom, is so boneheaded and his reaction to Cordelia so selfishly blind, that we're unwilling to credit their word.Then there's the fact that Shakespeare essentially uses the action of the play as a springboard for an examination of madness. The play was written during the period when Shakespeare was experimenting with obscure meanings anyway; add in the demented babble of several of the central characters, including Lear, and you've got a drama whose language is just about impossible to follow.
King Lear: BBC Dramatization (BBC Radio Presents) Romeo and Juliet: BBC Dramatization (BBC Radio Presents) The Jane Austen BBC Radio Drama Collection: Six BBC Radio Full-Cast Dramatisations Murder On The Orient Express: A BBC Radio 4 Full-Cast Dramatisation (BBC Radio Collection) Raymond Chandler: The BBC Radio Drama Collection: 8 BBC Radio 4 Full-Cast Dramatisations Sherlock Holmes Essentials, Volume 1 (Six Full Cast BBC Radio Dramas) (BBC Radio Series) Charles Dickens: The BBC Radio Drama Collection: Volume One: Classic Drama From the BBC Radio Archive Bonecrack: BBC Radio 4 Full-cast Dramatisation (BBC Radio Collection) The Secret Pilgrim (BBC Full Cast Radio Drama)(George Smiley series) (BBC Radio Series) The Honourable Schoolboy: A BBC Full-Cast Radio Drama (BBC Radio Series) A Small Town in Germany: A BBC Full-Cast Radio Drama (BBC Radio) Smiley's People: A BBC Full-Cast Radio Drama (BBC Radio Series) Romeo and Juliet: A BBC Radio 3 Full-cast Dramatisation. Starring Douglas Henshall & Cast (BBC Radio Shakespeare) The Lord of the Rings: The Trilogy: The Complete Collection Of The Classic BBC Radio Production (BBC Radio Collection) Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles: A Radio Dramatization (Colonial Radio Theatre on the Air) The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: A Radio Dramatization (Colonial Radio Theatre on the Air) H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds: A Radio Dramatization (Colonial Radio Theatre on the Air) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (BBC Radio Full-Cast Dramatization) The Looking Glass War (BBC Radio Full-Cast Dramatization) The Return of the King: Radio Dramatization
