English AO5 Lear

Arnold Kettle

“Lear’s madness is not so much a breakdown as a breakthrough. It is necessary”

Kenneth Muir

Shakespeare excludes gods and an afterlife: ‘It follows that human beings are entirely responsible for their actions, and if these lead to disaster, the tragedy is absolute.’

Dollimore

King Lear is really about ‘power, property and inheritance’, that Shakespeare is focusing on what happens when there is ‘a catastrophic redistribution of power’.

McCluskie

the play forces us to sympathise with the patriarchs, Lear and Gloucester, and the masculine power structure they represent. She suggests that the play shows female self-assertion and sexual desire as a source of evil, and a male control of society as natural.

Freudian lens

Ego: Both the Fool and Edgar act as the voice of reason by expressing the truth to Lear, understanding the inner workings of society, and gaining insight into reality

Marxist lens

a traditional feudal society (represented by Lear and his subjects), is being challenged by a more modern outlook that is rational and individualistic and has no respect for their values (represented by Edmund, Goneril and Regan).

Criticism of Marxism- Anthony Parr

it is inadequate to the play as a whole. In other words, by so thoroughly questioning what is natural and what unnatural, what is human and what animal, what is spiritual and what worldly, the play resists any single orthodox reading.