tragedy is Edgars, he childed as I fatherd, meaning not hate but love between the generations. Hence, Lears great love for his children and Edgars for Gloucester occasion the very tragedy that love is supposed to negate.The death of Cordelia has only pain to make meaningful, a premise quite the opposite of Bradleys belief cited above. The Lear world is love gone mad and therefore poised to self-destruct. Frye noted in the body of this essay that perhaps Lears madness would be our sanity if it were not sedated. Bloom argues that traditional sedatives such as a moral cleansing and recognition do not apply. The Fool therefore is needed in the play, Bloom believes, to insulate us from Lears madness that is with in all of us.Thus, the endings of Lear as seen by Bloom are not in the redemptive mode occasioned by flashes of insight, but are emanations of his wholeheartedness. Thus Shakespeare endowed Lear with sensibilities, broad enough to achieve the potentially infinite, so as to include of necessity emanations of recognition, but in the final analysis what remains in the Lear world is its own ashes consumed on the alter of paternal love. There are no gods to accept the offering.So, is dialectic sustained to the point where opposites are reconciled? If Bloom is right that Shakespeare invented what it means to be human, a synthesis may not be possible. Shakespeare gave us Bottom and Edgar, Iago and Richard III, and history gave us Mother Theresa and Adolf Hitler. Love, it would seem, does turn upon itself, and by doing so destroys what it is supposed to preserve.Works Cited PageBradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy. New York: Fawcett Books, n.d.Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998Frye, N. On Shakespeare. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986Knight, G.W. The Wheel of Fire. New York. Meridian Press, 1963.Donner, H.W. Is This the Promised End? Reflections on the tragic ending o...
