The Complete Julius Caesar

Of The Five Major Shakespearean Tragedieshamlet Macbeth Romeo And JulietKing Lear And Othelloking Lear Is Perhaps The Most Challenging. Issues Of Rulership Family And Blood Are Overlaid With Bastardy Loyalty Lust And Deceit. Add To This The Apparently Gratuitous On-Stage Blinding Of Gloucester The Deaths Of Cordelia Lear Gloucester And Kent And One Might Be Inclined To Agree With Samuel Johnson That The Good Suffer More Than The Evil That Love And Suffering In This Play Are Almost Interchangeable Terms And The Driving Force Of The Action Is Derived From The Power Of The Evil To Inflict Mental Agony Upon The Good (Quoted In Kermode 505).However One Would Be Mistaken To Accept Wholeheartedly The Happy Endings Of The Eighteenth And Nineteenth Century Revisionists. While The Pleasant Ending Would Certainly Ease The Sensibilities Of The Audience It Would Omit The Aristotlean Concepts Of Hamartia And The Purgation Of Fear And Pity Attendant Upon Actually Witnessing Shakespeares King Lear The Necessary Catharsis A Possible Scapegoat For Our Own Emotions.Of Course The Ending Is To Some Extent Unpleasant And Even Shocking; However One Can Argue That The Ending Is Organic To The Play; The Ending Is To A Great Extent The Play.