*Copy is black cloth with gold stamping. Front free endpaper has been mostly removed, presentation inscription dated 1908 with modern stamp and name underneath on next page. Small sticker with library call number on rear free endpaper. Binding is solid, no markings in text. Solid reading copy.
This edition contains an introduction and copious notes by Rolfe and several line drawing illustrations.
First performed about 1605, King Lear is one of the most relentlessly bleak of Shakespeare's tragedies. Probably written between Othello and Macbeth, when the playwright was at the peak of his tragic power, Lear's themes of filial ingratitude, injustice, and the meaninglessness of life in a seemingly indifferent universe are explored with unsurpassed power and depth.
The plot concerns a monarch betrayed by his daughters, robbed of his kingdom, descending into madness. Greed, treachery, and cruelty are rife and the denouement of the play is both brutal and heartbreaking. In fact so troubling is its vision of man's life that, until the mid-nineteenth century, the play was performed most often with a non-Shakespearean happy ending, with Lear back on his throne and Cordelia, the daughter nearest his heart, happily married to the noble Edgar. But there is a dark magnificence to Shakespeare's original vision of the Lear story, and the play is performed today essentially as he wrote it, uncompromised by later "improvements."
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