English 2610

I have also been sick all this week, which has been a real bummer because my head hasn't really been in the game for one of my favorite subjects: Shakespeare. So try to get what you can out of my cough syrup induced blather, as I try to share some of what I think King Lear is about...

Reading through the posts, a lot of people have continued to try to frame the subject of love. As an added tool in this process I would like to share with you an insight I came upon in one of my Shakespeare groups back home. We were reading Hamlet and discussing the love Hamlet and Ofelia shared. In attempting to define love we also ran into many definitions and so decided to first define what the opposite of love is. The problem was we came up with two very different ones, hate and apathy. As I have continued to to study Shakespeare I have continued to see how characters are influenced by both oppositions to love. Although hate and it's benefactors seem to influence the antagonists of most of the plays often apathy is what ultimately ends up destroying the protagonists, as it arguably does with King Lear.

Because I'm sick I also went on a Disney Princess Movie binge. For better or worse, I've learned a lot about literary theory since I last watched a lot of these movies and I couldn't stop applying the theory to the movies. Is it just me or does King Lear have a lot of similarities to the Cinderella story?