Enjoying King Lear :: King Lear William Shakespeare Literature Essays

Enjoying male monarch Lear If there was ever a historical King Lear, his memory has faded into mythology and/or been conflated with early(a)s. Llyr and his son Manannan are Celtic ocean-gods Manannan reappeared in Yeatss plays and the Dungeons and Dragons games. The children of Lir / Llyr were transform into waterbirds in another Celtic myth. Anglo-Israelite lore describes (Llyr Lleddiarth Half-Speech, king of Siluria / the Britains, father of Bran the Archdruid, who married Anna, the daughter of Joseph of Arimathea his close relatives included Cymbeline (Cunobelinus, fictionalized in Shakespeares later play), and Caractacus (Caradoc), a well-attested historical code better-known today from the childrens song (Its too late... they just passed by). In the Mabinogion, one of Llyrs two wives is Iweradd (Ireland). Geoffrey of Monmouth (History of the English Kings, around 1140), who provides our oldest written reference to King Lear (spelled Leir), d escribes him as a pre-Christian warrior king in what is now southwest England. (Click here to read it yourself.) This area now includes Cornwall (origin of cornish game hens.) Saint Albans (Albany, for which the nifty of New York State is named, is farther away. In the old story remembered by Geoffrey, Lear asked his three daughters whether they loved him. Two claimed to do so extravagantly, while the third verbalize she loved him only as a daughter should. Lear disinherited the honest daughter. The story appears elsewhere in world folklore there is an Eastern European reading material in which the honest daughter says she loves her father as much as she loves salt. Lear went to live with his first daughter, bringing a hundred pursuit. She demanded that he reduce his followers to fifty. Lear then went to live with the other daughter, who reduced the number to twenty-five. Lear went back and forth between the daughters until he was alone. Then the third daughter raised an army, d efeated the other two, and restored him to his kingdom. (The story appears in Holinshed, who adds that Cordelia succeeded her father as monarch and was deposed by the sons of her sisters.) This tale about how actions speak louder than words had recently been played on the London spot in The True Chronicle of King Leir.