Comparison Between King Lear and a Thousand Acres

King Lear and A Thousand Acres have many things similar seeing that A Thousand Acres is based upon King Lear but it is the differences between these works that establishes each as a prominent mark upon literature. You can draw many ties between the works by looking at the characters and the overall synopsis of the plot. A lot of the differences occur with the characters’ temperaments, the setting, and the perspective that the story is told from. It is these differences that allow for a reader to enjoy both works without that boring repetitiveness that usually occurs in works based upon each other.

The setting is by a wide margin the largest difference between the two. The setting is responsible for changing most of the rest of the book also. For example, King Lear is in medieval Europe. As a result of this the characters are members of the ruling class. The only people with land of their own back then. Because of their high rank in society the struggle not only affects them, it affects their entire estate. In Lear, because of the setting, the family is fighting over power, wealth, and loyalty. Their estate is a country so many other people are affected by the rift in the Lear family.

The setting of A Thousand Acres is somewhere in the agriculturally plentiful plains of America. These characters don’t wield the mighty power of the Lear family. Their conflict is on a much smaller scale. It affects, in reality, only themselves. In the story you can find the characters sitting around monopoly boards talking. In King Lear the family is very wealthy and probably has never known hard work in their lives. In A Thousand Acres we are looking at a farming family that labors to keep afloat. The family is a very close-knit group like all of the characters. Because of the more modern setting in A Thousand Acres the conflicts are over money, assets and other domestic issues of the home. It does not effect a large dominion like a country, only themselves.

Another very obvious difference between the two works