Lear

From one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars of our time, a beloved professor who has taught the Bard for over half a century-an intimate, wise, deeply compelling portrait of Lear, arguably Shakespeare's most tragic and compelling character, the third in a series of five short.

King Lear is one of the most famous and compelling characters in literature. The aged, abused monarch-a man in his eighties, like Bloom himself-is at once the consummate figure of authority and the classic example of the fall from grace and widely agreed to be Shakespeare's most moving, tragic hero.

Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Lear with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding-over the course of his own lifetime-of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.

Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare's characters make.