Stage Space in King Lear

Okay so I thought I posted last night but apparently my computer decided to suck big time so here we go again..


One of the first points made in the article was one of the ones I liked the most. I thought the idea that the stage actually took away from King Lear's greatness was interesting and I thought it was similar to the criticisms of a lot of movie adaptations. Like when you read a book your imagination creates the characters, the inflection in the lines they say and the entire situation, but when you watch the movie all of these are given to the audience and you're forced to accept or reject, but never to create your own. It becomes too hard to disassociate from the visuals presented. When the article said "The stage's insufficiency derives from its particularity, its rootedness in a precise time and place" that's what i was reminded of.

I also thought the idea that the mind can't really see space in its entirety, but instead simply sees objects was really different and I had never thought about it like that before, but I agree. When it talked about "the simplest experiment is enough to demonstrate that our view can perceive only objects in a spatial field
and not the spatial field itself, unless that field is understood as the effect of
particular objects grouped in a particular way and especially if those objects
are grouped according to principles that emphasize interrelatedness" that was when I realized that although it is weird to think about, it's true. You don't notice space, you notice the things in the space, and only when something is changed do you really take notice of it at all. It kind of reminded me of another reading we did, I forget which one, that talked about how humans absolutely have to organize and categorize things. In this case, the idea of space is abstract, so people have to focus on objects in order to find someway to placate themselves. Like toward then end when it says: "the divisions sutured this "literary" structure to a concept of "place," which rendered the play's action comprehensible and made possible a final aesthetic judgment" once again it comes back to the need to make it comprehensible, to make it conform and fit into something solid, pull it away from something abstract.