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King Lear is one of the darkest and most violent of Shakespeare’s tragedies, but just as the lightning flashes through the storm on the heath, there are moments of sublime beauty in this bleak play. Kelly Cumbee will help you enter the Elizabethan imagination so that you can see not just the madness of King Lear and the chaos created by his abdication, but the light and hope embedded in this masterpiece, this “fierce dispute, / Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay.”

Instructor: Kelly Cumbee

“On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again”

~ John Keats

O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute!

   Fair plumed Syren! Queen of far away!

   Leave melodizing on this wintry day,

Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:

Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute,

   Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay

   Must I burn through; once more humbly assay

The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit.

Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,

   Begetters of our deep eternal theme,

When through the old oak forest I am gone,

   Let me not wander in a barren dream,

But when I am consumed in the fire,

Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.