Of the five major Shakespearean tragedies-Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo
and Juliet, King Lear, and Othello-King Lear is perhaps the most
challenging. Issues of rulership, family and blood, are overlaid
with bastardy, loyalty, lust, and deceit. Add to this the
apparently gratuitous on-stage blinding of Gloucester, the deaths
of Cordelia, Lear, Gloucester, and Kent, and one might be inclined
to agree with Samuel Johnson that "The good suffer more than the
evil, that love and suffering, in this play, are almost
interchangeable terms and the driving force of the action is
derived from the power of the evil to inflict mental agony upon the
good" (quoted in Kermode, 505). However, one would be mistaken to
accept wholeheartedly the happy endings of the eighteenth and
nineteenth century revisionists. While the pleasant ending would
certainly ease the sensibilities of the audience, it would omit the
Aristotlean concepts of hamartia and the purgation of fear and pity
attendant upon actually witnessing Shakespeare's King Lear, the
necessary catharsis, a possible scapegoat for our own emotions. Of
course, the ending is to some extent unpleasant and even shocking;
however, one can argue that the ending is organic to the play; the
ending IS, to a great extent, the play.
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