Eliot: "I said the king was an incredibly foolish old man, which God knows he was; and that if he'd been my father I would have run away from home at the age of eight instead of waiting until I was ten...I pointed out that King Lear's opening speech was the height of idiocy. ... The Lear described in many critical essays sounds less like Shakespeare's monarch than the middle-class recreations of Lear in the nineteenth-century fiction of writers like Balzac and Turgenev. ... In order to exercise command, he must project an aura of authority, and this need in turn dictates that h...

• Word Count: 8939
• Approx Pages: 36
• Grade Level: High School