Tag: King Lear
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“These late eclipses … portend no good to us” – Shakespeare
Edward TaborBethesda, Maryland, United States Introduction Eclipses of the sun or moon were powerful images used by William Shakespeare in ten of his plays and poems.1 Shakespeare’s characters believed that eclipses were under the control of evil forces, that eclipses could predict the fall of governments, and noted how people blamed their weaknesses and failures…
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Nikolai Gogol’s The Diary of a Madman
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809–1852) was a member of the first wave of great Russian authors of the nineteenth century. Born in a Ukrainian Cossack village then part of the Russian Empire, he made his way to Saint Petersburg where he found his métier in the short story; a genre…
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Manifestations of madness in King Lear
Anoushka SinhaNew York, United States In his satirical masterpiece The Praise of Folly, the influential Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam attributes a Janus-like quality to madness, which he describes as two divergent manifestations: “one that which the Furies bring from hell” and “another…that proceeds from Folly.”1 Given the essay’s encomiastic title, it should come as…