King Lear, by William Shakespeare: My experience of reading Shakespeare

Abstract

Reading in Original version a Shakespeare play was in my mind a kind of challenge. I read quite a few of Shakespeare's plays in the past, but they were translated in French. I had heard so much about Shakespeare's wonderful style, the beautiful English language he used that I wanted to read it. I chose King Lear because I did not want to discover in English a play I had already read, and also because I was told that King Lear might be the most "powerful", the darkest but also the one in which the human behaviors were depicted in the most astonishing way. I wanted to discover in which way King Lear was this exceptional. I chose to read an original version of the text and I was quite surprise, I did not find it so difficult to read, to adapt to the syntax; actually, English syntax from the 17th century seems to me not so different from nowadays' one as expected; once you have assimilated some words and found their modern equivalent (above all the "-th-" words and the past tense), it is quite easy to understand the way the sentence is built.