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Suggestions for good companions to King Lear? I don’t mean scholarly but works that have thematic resonance as “responses” to Lear directly (in the way that Wide Sargasso Sea responds to Jane Eyre, but also even in the subtler senses of how The Sound and the Fury descends from Macbeth, The Secret Agent descends from Bleak House, etc without those works being “responses” per se). In particular I’m interested in Lear’s questioning of what is “natural” and the notion of “reason-in-madness” that emerges out of this.
Gilead has a few quotes from Lear, and subtle thematic resonance, but never references it directly.
Perhaps this is the wrong answer to the wrong question, but I'd avoid A Thousand Acres. Sidenote, can't say I'm a fan of Gilead either, 0/2 for King Lear + Iowa.
I’d had some reservations about bothering with A Thousand Acres for whatever vague and unsubstantiated reason lol, what exactly didn’t work about it?
So if I recall correctly, there's kind of the East of Eden problem -- a desire to mirror the original text, even when that makes the novel weaker as a whole. And you're comparing it to the original text the whole time, so it feels a bit like watching a live-action Disney remake. And even if we ignore that, it's just not a very compelling novel. The characters were dull, and there's a D A R K family secret that feels incredibly false and tacked-on.