The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear.
Marshall McLuhan
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King Lear is undoubtedly the greatest play ever written by Shakespeare — or anybody else for that matter. Hamlet is certainly great, but it doesn't contain as many elements of humanity as we see in Lear.
Paul Scofield
This is a plot, if ever there was one, to illustrate King Lear's complaint, "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport." I am aware this is the second time in two weeks I have been compelled to quote Lear, but there are times when Eminem simply will not do.
Roger Ebert
All of the arguments that historians and scholars, teachers and students, enter into are lacking in this dimension that I am giving you, and if they weren't lacking in this dimension, they would being to perceive much more significant questions than their arguments with one another. They would be, for example, considering the periods of history as being bookended by a consciousness that history had ended, and then on the other side a belief that history had begun again, and armed with just those ideas alone one could redo a great, great deal of history.
Jon Rappoport
It isn't difficult to leave King Lear or Macbeth, but once you have gone back to yourself, you want it to be the same self you have always been.
Paul Scofield
The "poetic avant-garde" relies on fantasy and dream reality as much as the Theatre of the Absurd does; it also disregards such traditional axioms as that of the basic unity and consistency of each character or the need for a plot. Yet basically the "poetic avant-garde" represents a different mood; it is more lyrical, and far less violent and grotesque. Even more important is its different attitude toward language: the "poetic avant-garde" relies to a far greater extent on consciously "poetic" speech; it aspires to plays that are in effect poems, images composed of a rich web of verbal associations.
The Theatre of the Absurd, on the other hand, tends toward a radical devaluation of language, toward a poetry that is to emerge from the concrete and objectified images of the stage itself. The element of language still plays an important part in this conception, but what happens on the stage transcends, and often contradicts, the words spoken by the characters. In Ionesco's The Chairs, for example, the poetic content of a powerfully poetic play does not lie in the banal words that are uttered but in the fact that they are spoken to an ever-growing number of empty chairs.Martin Esslin
McLuhan, Marshall
McManners, Joseph
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