Poor Tom

图书信息

作者	Palfrey, Simon
出版社	University of Chicago Press
ISBN	9780226150789
出版时间	2014-10-09
字数	47.0万
分类	University of Chicago Press,进口书,外文原版书,文学,自传,回忆录

读书简介

King Lear is perhaps the most fierce and moving play ever written. And yet there is a curious puzzle at its center. The figure to whom Shakespeare gives more lines than anyone except the king-Edgar-has often seemed little more than a blank, ignored and unloved, a belated moralizer who, try as he may, can never truly speak to the play's savaged heart. He saves his blinded father from suicide, but even this act of care is shadowed by suspicions of evasiveness and bad faith.In Poor Tom, Simon Palfrey asks us to go beyond any such received understandings-and thus to experience King Lear as never before. He argues that the part of Edgar is Shakespeare's most radical experiment in characterization, and his most exhaustive model of both human and theatrical possibility. The key to the Edgar character is that he spends most of the play disguised, much of it as "e;Poor Tom of Bedlam,"e; and his disguises come to uncanny life. The Edgar role is always more than one person; it animates multitudes, past and present and future, and gives life to states of being beyond the normal reach of the senses-undead, or not-yet, or ghostly, or possible rather than actual. And because the Edgar role both connects and retunes all of the figures and scenes in King Lear, close attention to this particular part can shine stunning new light on how the whole play works.The ultimate message of Palfrey's bravura analysis is the same for readers or actors or audiences as it is for the characters in the play: see and listen feelingly; pay attention, especially when it seems as though there is nothing there.

目录

Cover

Copyright

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Contents

On Texts

1. Prelude: The Hanging Man

2. Introduction

3. Interlude: The Stranger

4. Scene 1: Into the Hollow

5. Interlude: Job Redux

6. Scene 2: Enter Tom

7. Interlude: Tom Is . . . ?

8. Scene 3: Tom’s Voices

9. Interlude: To Be Allegory

10. Scene 4: Tom’s Places

11. Interlude: History Man

12. Scene 5: Lurk, Lurk

13. Interlude: Living King Lear

14. Scene 6: Shuttered Genealogy

15. Interlude: Decreated

16. Scene 7: Fool to Sorrow

17. Interlude: Humanist and Posthumanist: A Dialogue

18. Scene 8: To the Edge of the Cliff

19. Interlude: The Binding

20. Scene 9: Fallen, or Not?

21. Interlude: Everyman

22. Scene 10: Alive, or Dead?

23. Interlude: The Pending World

24. Scene 11: Dark Places

25. Interlude: Jacob and Esau

26. Scene 12: Departures

27. Conclusion: Shakespeare’s Radical

28. Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Index