Poor Tom – Living "King Lear" - Hardcover

Palfrey, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022615064X ISBN 13: 9780226150642

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2014

Synopsis

One of the most memorable and affecting Shakespearean characters is Edgar in King Lear. He has long been celebrated for his faithfulness in the face of his father's rejection, and the scene in which he saves his blinded father from suicide is regarded as one of the most moving in all of Shakespeare. In Poor Tom, Simon Palfrey asks us to rethink all those received ideas - and thus to experience King Lear as never before. He argues that Edgar is Shakespeare's most radical experiment in characterization - and also 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 "Poor Tom of Bedlam," 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 the play, a close attention to this particular part can shine 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.

About this title

Review:

"Reading "Poor Tom" has the effect of watching a familiar landscape expand and morph in myriad, telling ways, opening up ever deeper reserves of strangeness in the much-discussed and much-estranged play of "King Lear." This is a very rare sort of work."--Kenneth Gross, author of Shylock Is Shakespeare and Puppet

"Reading Poor Tom has the effect of watching a familiar landscape expand and morph in myriad, telling ways, opening up ever deeper reserves of strangeness in the much-discussed and much-estranged play of King Lear. This is a very rare sort of work."--Kenneth Gross, author of Shylock Is Shakespeare and Puppet

Palfrey is one of the most innovative and interesting Shakespeare scholars of his generation. Poor Tom is powerfully written, with a strong voice and poetic style that is ceaselessly illuminating. --Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life"

By putting us in touch with Poor Tom, a near nullity, this book draws us irresistibly into the surcharged plenum of King Lear. Palfrey s critical gifts and skills are exquisite, but perhaps more singular still is his openness to the playworld s life-making possibilities. His is a practice of vitalization, animating even the most inert recesses of the tragedy, and so compellingly that we might well wonder why we missed so much before. --Margreta de Grazia, University of Pennsylvania"

"Palfrey is one of the most innovative and interesting Shakespeare scholars of his generation. Poor Tom is powerfully written, with a strong voice and poetic style that is ceaselessly illuminating."--Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life

"By putting us in touch with Poor Tom, a near nullity, this book draws us irresistibly into the surcharged plenum of King Lear. Palfrey's critical gifts and skills are exquisite, but perhaps more singular still is his openness to the playworld's life-making possibilities. His is a practice of vitalization, animating even the most inert recesses of the tragedy, and so compellingly that we might well wonder why we missed so much before."--Margreta de Grazia, University of Pennsylvania

About the Author:

Simon Palfrey is professor of English literature at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Brasenose College. He is joint general editor of Shakespeare Now! and the author of a number of nonfiction works as well as a novel and a play.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 022615064X
• ISBN 13: 9780226150642
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 280