Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 76 posts

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#41

Post by dylan604 »

jfengel wrote: post #22
briefcomment wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need more writing where people are the best they can be. Imagine the good Shakespeare could have done by making his characters the best role models. People imitate, and Shakespeare has incredible reach. As I get older, I have little patience for flawed characters, and love it when I see someone act good all the time in fiction. Edit: Tintin, for example, is one of my favorite fictional characters of all time. He i…

I get that, and it's a challenge for me as a Shakespeare actor and director. I often work with these "flawed" characters, and early in the process there's this question of "do I really want to tell the story about this person?" I've got only limited patience for people being stupid and/or mean. Can't we tell stories about good and smart people? Those stories exist, but they're depressingly rare. I have ways of turnin…

Stories like that tend to go campy and obvious Hollywood happy endings. Life isn't like that. The good guy rarely wins for being good.

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#42

Post by desi_ninja »

edmundsauto wrote: post #39
briefcomment wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need more writing where people are the best they can be. Imagine the good Shakespeare could have done by making his characters the best role models. People imitate, and Shakespeare has incredible reach. As I get older, I have little patience for flawed characters, and love it when I see someone act good all the time in fiction. Edit: Tintin, for example, is one of my favorite fictional characters of all time. He i…

Another perspective: when I was younger, I liked Hardy Boys and Tom Swift because of their earnest niceness. As I get older, I realize that the world is a complex place and people (characters) are nuanced. Reduction to black/white (good/bad) squeezes the nuance and thus the humanity. For similar reasons, I don't enjoy reading about the good works of (Western) holy people. (Buddhism and Hindu stories, the small exposu…

I can help with suggesting some good reads on mythological books in Hinduism if you like

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#43

Post by winstonewert »

renjimen wrote: post #31
winstonewert wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of the black death date rate was due to lack of medical knowledge? Would we really have the same terrible outcome if a similar disease hit today?

Well, all of it was due to the lack of medical knowledge. The bubonic plague hardly kills anyone anymore. The point the parent is making is that we shouldn't compare the societal effects of COVID19 today with that of the bubonic plague when it was at its worst.

But his conclusion seems to have been: we need to worry about what happens if a disease like the black plague hits again: which, well, no we don't. If we need to worry about a future pandemic its one which is quite different the plauge and thus one we are defenseless against.

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#44

Post by briefcomment »

edmundsauto wrote: post #39
briefcomment wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need more writing where people are the best they can be. Imagine the good Shakespeare could have done by making his characters the best role models. People imitate, and Shakespeare has incredible reach. As I get older, I have little patience for flawed characters, and love it when I see someone act good all the time in fiction. Edit: Tintin, for example, is one of my favorite fictional characters of all time. He i…

Another perspective: when I was younger, I liked Hardy Boys and Tom Swift because of their earnest niceness. As I get older, I realize that the world is a complex place and people (characters) are nuanced. Reduction to black/white (good/bad) squeezes the nuance and thus the humanity. For similar reasons, I don't enjoy reading about the good works of (Western) holy people. (Buddhism and Hindu stories, the small exposu…

I understand reality is nuanced, but I want to be exposed to ideals when I read. I'm not too interested in recreating reality. I want to see what to strive towards. I recall the Hardy Boys with a lot of fondness. They meant a lot to me as a child.

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#45

Post by svat »

mav3rick wrote: post #16
libraryofbabel wrote: post #8

Note: the assertion that the experience of plague caused Shakespeare to change the ending of King Lear is really just speculation by one scholar. The evidence is circumstantial in the extreme. We know rather little about Shakespeare’s biography or inner life, and after two centuries of people combing over every scrap of archival evidence they can find we are not likely to discover much more. Which is fine by me reall…

Can you suggest a plain English adaption of his works ?

See the series "No Fear Shakespeare" by SparkNotes, e.g. King Lear starts here: https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/lear/page_2/ The full set is here: https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/#jumpTo-no-fear

Ignore anyone who may look down on using this. The “plain English” version is often redundant, and of course the language in the original has metre and sometimes rhyme (take a look at the opening of Macbeth: https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/macbeth/page_2...), but the “plain English” version is occasionally genuinely useful, and overall I find it valuable. Most of the time (at least after you get the hang of the language, if you haven't read anything from that period before) you'll be reading just the original, but having the “translation” right there can help.

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#46

Post by triceratops »

barnacled wrote: post #20

I am seeing a trend recently of comparing the plague to covid 19 and it is rather frustrating. The case fatality rate of the black death was 30-60% pretty much across the board for the bubonic variant. Covid 19 is 0.4% and really that is heavily skewed by those over the age of 70 and especially 80. Covid 19, while enormously disruptive due to its infectiousness and tendency to put a big chunk of people in hospital, d…

> The reality is if a black death like disease hit the modern world civilisation would likely more or less totally collapse.

Why do believe that? It didn't collapse medieval European civilization.

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#47

Post by triceratops »

winstonewert wrote: post #24
barnacled wrote: post #20

I am seeing a trend recently of comparing the plague to covid 19 and it is rather frustrating. The case fatality rate of the black death was 30-60% pretty much across the board for the bubonic variant. Covid 19 is 0.4% and really that is heavily skewed by those over the age of 70 and especially 80. Covid 19, while enormously disruptive due to its infectiousness and tendency to put a big chunk of people in hospital, d…

How much of the black death date rate was due to lack of medical knowledge? Would we really have the same terrible outcome if a similar disease hit today?

I think GP was hypothesizing an epidemic that had a black death rate even with our present medical knowledge.

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#48

Post by edem »

triceratops wrote: post #46
barnacled wrote: post #20

I am seeing a trend recently of comparing the plague to covid 19 and it is rather frustrating. The case fatality rate of the black death was 30-60% pretty much across the board for the bubonic variant. Covid 19 is 0.4% and really that is heavily skewed by those over the age of 70 and especially 80. Covid 19, while enormously disruptive due to its infectiousness and tendency to put a big chunk of people in hospital, d…

> The reality is if a black death like disease hit the modern world civilisation would likely more or less totally collapse. Why do believe that? It didn't collapse medieval European civilization.

You are comparing apples to oranges.

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#49

Post by svat »

tehnub wrote: post #4
marricks wrote: post #3

Huge aside but... if you like Tolstoy and Shakespeare reading Tolstoy's take down of Shakespeare is super interesting: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tolstoy_on_Shakespeare He specifically goes to town on King Lear and gets into some interesting discussions on how he thinks the earlier Lear Shakespeare referenced is structurally better. Also reveals Tolstoy's own perspective on writing as a moral endeavor which he fe…

Also interesting is George Orwell's critique of Tolstoy's critique! https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf

Wow this is great, thank you! As someone with a reasonably positive opinion of all three here (Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Orwell), I must say Orwell's clarity is remarkable.

> It is a mistake to write Tolstoy off as a moralist attacking an artist. […] But his main aim, in his later years, was to narrow the range of human consciousness. One's interests, one's points of attachment to the physical world and the day-to-day struggle, must be as few and not as many as possible. […] Indeed his whole theory of ‘crazes’ or ‘epidemic suggestions’, in which he lumps together such things as the Crusades and the Dutch passion of tulip growing, shows a willingness to regard many human activities as mere ant-like rushings to and fro, inexplicable and uninteresting. Clearly he could have no patience with a chaotic, detailed, discursive writer like Shakespeare. His reaction is that of an irritable old man who is being pestered by a noisy child. ‘Why do you keep jumping up and down like that? Why can't you sit still like I do?’ In a way the old man is in the right, but the trouble is that the child, has a feeling in its limbs which the old man has lost. And if the old man knows of the existence of this feeling, the effect is merely to increase his irritation: he would make children senile, if he could.

His perception of King Lear's true moral, of Tolstoy (or Gandhi) as “saint”, and of “creeds […] which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power” — in all of this Orwell hits the nail on the head IMO.

Re: A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it

#50

Post by pixl97 »

tehnub wrote: post #4
marricks wrote: post #3

Huge aside but... if you like Tolstoy and Shakespeare reading Tolstoy's take down of Shakespeare is super interesting: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tolstoy_on_Shakespeare He specifically goes to town on King Lear and gets into some interesting discussions on how he thinks the earlier Lear Shakespeare referenced is structurally better. Also reveals Tolstoy's own perspective on writing as a moral endeavor which he fe…

Also interesting is George Orwell's critique of Tolstoy's critique! https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf

Glad you posted that.

>It is doubtful whether the sense of tragedy is compatible with belief in God

I understand politics better already.

Post reply on HN