One was a fantasia, King Lear; the other was a quartette dedicated to the memory of Bach.
"You mean...what has Cordelia to do with it?" Levin asked timidly, forgetting that the fantasia was supposed to represent King Lear.
"No, I beg your pardon!" she hastily corrected herself, "King Lear! I hadn't noticed the crown."(Bruno had very cleverly provided one, which fitted him exactly, by cutting out the centre of a dandelion to make room for his head.)
King Lear folded his arms (to the imminent peril of his beard) and said, in a mild explanatory tone, "Ay, every inch a king!" and then paused, as if to consider how this could best be proved.
It was clearly his opinion that, however suitable the habit of turning head-over-heels might be to such petty individuals as Hamlet and King Lear, it would never do for Bruno to sacrifice his dignity to such an extent.
He dressed Jim up in
King Lear's outfit -- it was a long curtain-calico gown, and a white horse-hair wig and whiskers; and then he took his theater paint and painted Jim's face and hands and ears and neck all over a dead, dull, solid blue, like a man that's been drownded nine days.
His mind instantly veered back again to Shakespeare and
King Lear. "Goneril and Regan!" he cried.
One day we took the train and went down to Mannheim to see "
King Lear" played in German.
He quite realises my idea of
King Lear, as he appeared when in possession of his kingdom, Mr Richard--the same good humour, the same white hair and partial baldness, the same liability to be imposed upon.
That of
King Lear, which is one of Shakespeare's great romantic historical plays, is, for instance, to be found in Geoffrey of Monmouth, in Wace's Brut, and in Layamon's Brut.
Fortunately, the beasts seemed more bent on stretching their paws, and yawning, and flourishing their tails, than devouring me alive; but they would suffer no resurrection, and I was forced to lie till their malignant masters pleased to deliver me: then, hatless and trembling with wrath, I ordered the miscreants to let me out - on their peril to keep me one minute longer - with several incoherent threats of retaliation that, in their indefinite depth of virulency, smacked of
King Lear.
(Brutus); 'Hamlet' the struggle of a perplexed and divided soul; 'Othello' the ruin of a noble life by an evil one through the terrible power of jealousy; '
King Lear' unnatural ingratitude working its hateful will and yet thwarted at the end by its own excess and by faithful love; and
King Lear - the hero of William Shakespeare's tragedy who was betrayed and mistreated by two of his scheming daughters