Please watch Belle's Youtube video, a Chinese "King Lear" in the making

Okay, the stars are in alignment, Jessica Barksdale Inclán, James Whyle, Matthew Biberman, Thomas Huynh. Eric Nichols, Steve Hauk, Ericka Lutz and anyone who wishes to join, WELCOME! Don't be shy. Yesterday, we had Weather, King Lear weather in the middle of a California summer. And it was a deluge right over my head. Five miles inland, it was "merely" 101 degrees heat. We had bolt lighting, thunder and massive downpour like nothing I’d ever seen. No wind, but that’s enough for me to channel King Lear.

My proposal: begin a discussion of “King Lear.”

Jessica has been wavering about teaching Lear. I say, drop Hamlet on his head for now, and dig into Lear. Steve Hauk, a playwright, goaded me to begin reading Shakespeare some years ago, He said, “Belle, you love Chekhov, why not Shaxbeard?” Matthew is a professor of English Lit and much more, so he will no doubt be a strong voice here. James Whyle because he is a talented playwright with radio plays produced on BBC Radio 4 and has also directed Lear. Thomas Huyhn loves The Tempest and is the editor/annotator of The Art of War , so he will have much to contribute. Eric, because he loves the Bible and well, the King James version as some people wildly guess was translated partly by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. And in Lear, the Bard makes reference to the Wisdom of Solomon. Ericka, because she is a theater person and supremely dramatic ;) And no one can say he or she knows Lear so well, he/she can’t learn more. And it may be good to study Lear out of an academic setting since theories can get a little esoteric-silly, no? Also, we are not young. We have all lived!

B.Y.

Each one of us has or had a father. Banquo was not of woman born, but he could never have claimed not to have been seeded by a father, even if in vitro. If you are lucky, you may still have your father with whom you fight and/or receive guidance. For others, the early loss or disappointment in your father may have made your life an eternal search for one.

And we all know LOVE, parental, sexual, Platonic, and familial. (I’ve known love of physician for a patient). In Lear, excess of love can kill. Love reigns supreme as the theme in Lear, so we have a platform upon which we all can meet. But there themes galore in Lear: truth-telling, old age, land, POWER, sexual and familial jealousy, nature. . . .

Me? I met Lear as a teenager and will play his fool before I die. I am fascinated by all truthteller-fools in Shakespeare. I write my Chinese “King Lear” in graphic novel format. I am too much on autopilot of late and would like some of the momentum I had many years ago. I’m sitting too comfy and need to feel the pain and storm. I love old men. My father, my great grandfather, the fathers of my old boyfriends ;) There is something incredibly vulnerable, wrenching about men’s decent from power. I feel as if I’ve made that theme in my life’s work.

As Harold Bloom writes in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human: “there is only one valid form of love and only one: that at the end, between Lear and Cordelia, Gloucester and Edgar.” But this excessive love leads to disaster.

Let’s begin here. Please write your posts under your own bogs and link them here and/or to one another. There is no time limit to how long we will discuss Lear. You can write a post today or years from now.

Let’s make use of Redroom.com in the best way possible. Let it be a learning tool of a writing/reading community.

Amen.

This was an ealier post: "Dear Mr. Shakespeare"