5. Crash and Burn

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this final module, we try to come to terms with the bleakness of King Lear, and think about why, despite this, that the play remains one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays today.

Course

In this course, we explore several aspects of King Lear. We begin by looking at some of the textual problems of the play, before looking at aspects of the play and its performance. In particular, we explore the play’s comedic structure, the staging of the play, the role of Lear himself, and the problem of the play’s bleakness.

Lecturer

Born in Bristol, and educated at Oxford and St Louis, Dr John Lennard has taught English, American, and Commonwealth Literature in Cambridge, London, and Jamaica over more than twenty years. He has written two widely used textbooks (on poetry and drama) and monographs on Shakespeare, Paul Scott, Nabokov, and Faulkner, as well as two collections of essays on contemporary genre writers in crime, science fiction and fantasy, and romance. Enthusiastic, discursive, widely knowledgeable, and a demon for punctuation (on which he has also published extensively), he has been a popular Summer School Course Leader and lecturer for the Institute of Continuing Education since 1992.