Reading Shakespeare’s King Lear in the context of Erasmus’ amazing Praise of Folly brings the depth of this play into focus. Erasmus, writing about the state of the world in the 16th Century, could be writing about the world today and Shakespeare really seems to pick up on these insights: “ Now, what else is the whole…
Tag: King Lear
King Lear and Sonnet 146
King Lear is a play that exposes the ways in which human beings are deeply alienated from themselves when they are totally identified with the demands of their egos. King Lear himself is such a character. It is only through the intense suffering imposed on him by rejection, amplified by his exposure to the elements…
King Lear & Cordelia
How can we understand Cordelia’s confrontation with her father King Lear? In the Edwin Sherin directed version with James Earl Jones as Lear, staged in Central Park New York, King Lear’s violence seems to provoke a response in Cordelia which is a mirror of her father. Like father like daughter? Is there any grace in this Cordelia,…
All the World’s a Stage – and are we really nothing but players?? Rehearsals! Clemente/Catalyst students
In 3 weeks time the Clemente/ Catalyst students have to present extracts from As You Like It to a public audience at the MAC (Mission Australia Centre) Surry Hills. We are going to begin with a dramatised reading of Jacques’s speech (perhaps the most famous speech in all of Shakespeare): “All the world’s a stage, And all…
Thomas Hardy’s Clym Yeobright: Madman? Heretic? or Blasphemer?
In the last two pages of Return of the Native Hardy alludes to the fact that Clym preaching to the “heathmen and women” on Rainbarrow, just before his 33rd birthday echoes Jesus’s work on the Sermon on the Mount. Is this how Hardy wants us to see Clym, as a saviour to the unenlightened rustics of…
Michael Griffith: Home Page- Literature and Life Summer 2023 
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