very leary.

I've had a slow go at King Lear this week, and I'm still pretty lost. I finally finished reading the text today, and although Dr. Burton's mini-lecture on Lear helped me to find some additional meaning to the play, I still don't know that I got out of it all that I could. I had planned to read The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser because the Bevington intro to Lear claimed that it was a version of the story of King Lear. So I grabbed my Broadview Anthology of British Literature and did some of the preliminary reading on The Faerie Queen. There was no mention of King Lear at all in the introduction, but I still have on good authority that Lear is somewhere there. So I know I will have to do some further digging of critiques to find the answers I'm looking for, and also so see King Lear as a happy tale rather than the Shakespearean take which ends all in blood and several dead bodies being dragged from off the stage. But in the meantime, I'm going to watch Ian McKellan's role as Lear, and I know that seeing the film will fill in the holes that I missed when I read the text.
Until then, happy tragedying.