King Lear

A man in Wales has returned his late grandfather's library books, which were overdue by 116 years.

Peter O'Sullivan found the copies of John Milton's Paradise Lost and William Shakespeare's King Lear hidden behind other books in his mother's home.

A note inside showed they were borrowed in 1910.

Despite them being more than 6,000 weeks late, Mr O'Sullivan was not asked to pay a fine.

And yet Ian McKellen's Richard III is set in an alternate 1930s fascist Britain.

Unlike, say, King Lear or Mc...

Ah! that Scotsman, Richard III really did exist, lost the Battle of Bosworth Field to Henry Tudor, Henry VII, whose son was Henry VIII, whose daughter was Queen Elizabeth I.

I noted during the opening montage that it goes back and forth between looking like footage from the news of riots, but also when it's introducing the parents in particular, it looks like Miami Vice or NYPD Blue or some other crime-related show you'd see on TV rather than in the cinema.

We live the given life and not the planned.

This is a poem about one of my absolute favorite scenes, maybe in all of Shakespeare, certainly in King Lear, when Gloucester is blind and he's wandering toward the cliffs of Dover and he asks a stranger to help him to the edge because he wants to cast himself off.

And who he meets is his son in disguise.

Naturally, then his son, not wishing to see his father perish, leads him to a small hillock and helps him kind of tumble over and then pretends that he is now a second stranger at the far bottom of the cliff who has seen him miraculously survive a great fall.

You know, he's made two Shakespeare annotations so far.

And there was a King Lear line in one of the later Nukem High movies.

I don't know if you guys picked up on that.

One of his characters in Terra Firma is a big Samuel Fuller fan, so...

You want Longfellow and Bryant and Whittier and Emerson and Lowell And Shakespeare, she added, don't you like Shakespeare's plays? We had ever so much about Shakespeare.

Weren't you perfectly astonished when you found out how many other plays there were of his? I always thought there was nothing but Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth, and Richard III, and King Lear, and that one that Robson and Crane have.

Oh yes, comedy of errors.

so you see how ridiculous this young girl by the betrayal of such ignorance made herself in conversation with a cultured young gentleman whose good opinion she was most anxious to win and yet to talk too much about books is not well it often marks the pedantic and egotistic character it is safe to say that unless one happens to meet a very congenial mind among conversers in general society to introduce the subject of books is liable to be misconstrued it is not very long since another popular modern novelist held up to scorn and ridicule the young woman whose particular ambition seemed to be to let society know what an immense number of books she had been reading Nevertheless, one must have a good groundwork of knowledge of books in order to avoid mistakes such as poor Irene made in talking with young Corrie.

Um, is you have, you have basically Rubeus Hagrid, this hermaphroditic giant, astride a golden snitch and a dragon.

Um, now this book was available in this Penguin Mythical Library paperback all through the UK in 1970, um, when Rowling was probably studying alchemy in, in light of her A-levels and King Lear, which I'm assuming 'cause of, that was one of the plays she saw that year.

It was part of her studies.

And the book Alchemical Theatre by, um, Nichols on my shelf over here, um, this was the hottest book in Shakespeare studies, which talked about literary alchemy a- as, as really the foundation for a proper understanding of, you know, what some say is the greatest play in English literature, certainly, you know, one of the finest works of Shakespeare.

That one leads to really good conversation in class.

We next jump from Havard to reading Shakespeare's play King Lear.

Now, this is where we're getting a bit more into the classical tradition approach to leadership, because Havard is pretty much a stamp.

He's a really good version of a modern leadership book, I think.

The classical approach to leadership, to really anything prior to the 19th century, the way leaders were formed was through looking at examples of leaders.

And you get those examples from history and from literature.

In King Lear, you've got this wonderful story about a king who really wants to keep the title, but give away his authority.

And that choice, which I think is understandable for anyone who's been in a titled position of leadership, you can feel the temptation.