Author : Guy Story Brown
Publisher : Mercer University Press
ISBN 13 : 0881461857
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (814 download)
Book Synopsis Shakespeare's Philosopher King by : Guy Story Brown
Download or read book Shakespeare's Philosopher King written by Guy Story Brown and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tragedy of King Lear precedes Cymbeline King of Britain as the earliest of Shakespeare's English history plays in the sense that it represents a primordial age when the "sceptered isle" of "England" was hardly yet even clearly differentiated from "Britain." The decay and fall of the world is visible, i.e., is originally conceivable as a subject, only from a vantage that is in some sense not itself limited to error or fault. This resolution cannot be a thesis that is merely proved from outside but a vantage that emerges in a careful reading of the 1623 Folio text from the beginning that is alert both to the whole of Shakespeare's corpus and its cultural context. The reading shows The Tragedy of King Lear to be a Thomistic portrayal of the problem and reality of kingship, in which there emerges an increasingly explicit and profoundbut unsentimentalChristianity that seems as much Augustinian as Thomistic.