time line of lear criticism

17th C - restoration period

nahum tate’s reworking: “too horrible and too comfortless to be enjoyable”, edgar and cordelia marry

samuel johnson: ending was “contrary to the natural ideas justice, to the hope of the reader” shakespeare has “overstepped boundaries and tate has reinstated them”

18th C - Romantic period

• valorisation of suffering

• “the picture becomes gigantic and fills us with such alarm that we should entertain the idea that heavenly bodies might one day fall from their appointed orbits”

• the large scale “terrible beauty” is not sad but sublime

• Haslet - “the mind of lear is like a tall ship driven about by the winds”

• questions whether nature is the “prime mover” or if there is a “prime mover behind nature”

early 20th C

• Bradley - ending is unlike other tragedies as it doesn’t seem inevitable “fall suddenly like a bolt from a sky cleared by the vanished storm”

• Jobian parallels of Lear - “spiritual development through suffering”, provides a Jobeish comfort that suffering is worthwhile as we gain spiritual awareness

• Wilson Knight - the plays suffering is a part of “purgatorial progress to self knowledge”

• encourages to endure life and to not look for pleasure on earth but for life after death

1960’s

• absurdism due to the post-war disillusion reflecting on the absurdity of the human condition

• Barbara Everett - “attempts to read the play as a parable of meaningful suffering were self deluding and wilful misreadings”

• Jan Kott - “nothing but the cruel earth where man goes on his journey from cradle to grave” “a gigantic pantomime” where “all that remains is the earth empty and bleeding”

1980’s

Dollimore - the plays suffering is about “power, property, inheritance” - selfhood is attained and destroyed through property

21st C

Trevor Nunn - “history tells us to believe the gods will intervene on the side of virtue, shakespeare says they dont”

Laurence Olivier - “he’s like all of us really: he’s just a stupid old fart”

“the essence of Wood’s Lear was that he lived in a permanent state of spiritual schizophrenia”