bookshelf

LEAR

Name: LEAR
Author: Harold Bloom
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6419-4

THE GREAT IMAGE OF AUTHORITY

by Harold Bloom ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

A measured, thoughtful assessment of a key play in the Shakespeare canon.

bookshelf

The noted critic and English professor digs deep to uncover what makes this play so profound.

After books on Falstaff and Cleopatra, the third installment in Bloom’s (Humanities/Yale Univ.) Shakespeare’s Personalities series takes on King Lear, who, along with Prince Hamlet, is one of “Shakespeare’s most challenging personalities.” These two plays are the “ultimate dramas yet conceived by humankind.” High praise indeed from the prolific author who, now in his late 80s, wrestles with the complexities of another man also in his 80s. Bloom brings this dark tale of a king in search of love to life via his incisive close reading of the text. As he writes, King Lear is the “most ironic of all tragedies, surpassing even Hamlet.” Noting all the times the word “nothing” is used, this “nihilistic play” leaps “beyond hope, into nothingness.” Lear has an “enormous need to be loved,” especially by his youngest daughter, Cordelia. Her sisters, Goneril and Regan, Bloom writes, are “monsters of the deep, preying upon their victims, and at last on one another.” The author does a fine job of explicating Edgar, the “just and rational avenger.” In the first two quartos of the play, Bloom notes, Edgar is given special prominence in the play’s lengthy title. After Lear, he’s the “crucial personality in the drama.” From Poor Tom to serving man to peasant to messenger to masked knight, “in all of Shakespeare, there is nothing like these astonishing metamorphoses.” The “ultimate atrocities” in the play are Cornwall’s gouging of Gloucester’s eyes, enacted before us, and the hanging of Cordelia, done offstage. “In what must be the shattering beyond all measure,” writes Bloom, “in Shakespeare and indeed all Western literature, Lear enters with the dead Cordelia in his arms.”

A measured, thoughtful assessment of a key play in the Shakespeare canon.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-6419-4

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BRIGHT BOOK OF LIFE
by Harold Bloom

- BOOK REVIEW
TAKE ARMS AGAINST A SEA OF TROUBLES
by Harold Bloom

- BOOK REVIEW
THE AMERICAN CANON
by Harold Bloom ; edited by David Mikics

bookshelf

NUTCRACKER

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

bookshelf

This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING
by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER
by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

bookshelf

TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

bookshelf

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.