King Lear - Critical Quotations

Thomas P. Roche (On the ending of the play)

"as bleak and unrewarding as man can reach outside the gates of hell"

Maynard Mack (On the events following Lear's abdication)

"the waiting coil of consequences [that] leaps into threatening life"

Paul A. Jorgensen (On self discovery)

"self knowledge means understanding the vileness of the flesh" in order to attain this wisdom, people must recognize that they "are born of the seed of Adam" and as such are "impure...and abominable before God"

A.C. Bradley

The Fool "makes incessant and cutting reminders of [Lear's folly and wrong]" "Lear comes in his affliction to think of others first, and to seek, in tender solicitude for his 'poor boy', the shelter he scorns for his own bare head"

Jan Kott (On the Fool)

His character represents the theme of the entire play "the decay and fall of the world" He is the only character to realise that "the only true madness is to regard the world as rational"

A.C. Bradley

In the third Act Lear learns to "discern the falseness of flattery and the brutality of authority" and to "pierce through rank and raiment to the common humanity beneath"

Thomas P. Roche

Shakespeare intended Lear to be a "total failure, in fact and in vision" At the end of the play Lear "sees nothing" because "every gesture of his love is countered by an equal and opposite gesture of hatred"

Paul A. Jorgensen

"Lear is still pathetically unwise in worldly matters at the end of the play" but none of this matters because "he has learned that which, especially for a dying man, is all important"

Frank Kermode (existentialist/nihilist reading)

"Sanity, dignity and love depend upon a structure of belief which might even be a structure of illusion"

Tony Church (On Goneril and Regan in I.i)

"the balance of sympathy tends to be partly with the two elder daughters because of the position in which Lear has put them"

Tony Church (On Lear)

"Lear's penetrating eye exposes the whole structure of so-called justice and civilisation as the rotten edifice of our common experience"

Tony Church

The vast amount of animal imagery in the play "seems to say that the underlying nature of human beings is that of the worst jungle animals"

Jonathan Dollimore (marxist/socialist reading)

King Lear is "a play about power, property and inheritance...a catastrophic redistribution of power and property - and, eventually, a civil war - disclose the awful truth that [in capitalist society] these two things are somehow prior to the laws of human kindness and not vice-versa."

Fintan O'Toole

"Duty and bonds are the values of a feudal society, 'how much?' is the basic question of a capitalist one. Lear breaks the bonds, bringing his kingdom and all the fixed relationships within it tumbling down with the question 'Which of you shall we say doth love us most?'"

Kathleen McLuskie (feminist reading)

The play is ultimately anti-feminist, and cannot be read but as an endorsement of the necessity for male power over the disruptive female desires which have brought about the tragedy.

Coppelia Kahn (feminist reading)

"In this patriarchal world, masculine identity depends upon repressing the vulnerability, dependency and capacity for feeling which are called 'feminine'"

Samuel Johnson (In support of poetic justice)

"since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded that the observation of justice makes a play worse" (justice should be done, even if the resulting outcome is unrealistic)

A.C. Bradley (On King Lear as a Christian parable)

"Let us renounce the world, hate it and lose it gladly. The only real thing in it is the soul, with its courage, patience and devotion. And nothing outward can touch that"

Jan Kott (Post-Christian/existentialist/absurdist reading)

The function of the fool is to reveal the absurdity of the belief that there are any meaningful values in the world."He rejects all appearances of law, justice, moral order" "The Fool knows that the only true madness is to regard the world as rational."

Ewan Fernie (anti-humanist reading) (take that Ms Mackenzie)

The play reveals that if there is any kind of salvation, it is not in the struggle of the individual but in the recognition that we live in and through others: the play shows that if there is any hope for the future it is to be achieved through the denial of our own egos.

Ewan Fernie (On Lear's response to Cordelia's death)

Only, finally at her death does he recognise her life to be separate and independent of his need of her, and thus achieves a state of knowledge and love. "carrying his child he at last becomes a father instead of an aged dependent...His unique distinction among tragic heroes is that he dies pointing away from himself, at someone else"

Josephine Waters Bennett (On Lear's constant references to his daughters on the Heath)

"This obsession or idee fixe, is one of the most easily recognized exhibitions of insanity"

Josephine Waters Bennett (On the cause of Lear's madness)

"his bitter , futile resentment, his frustrated will which has driven him to insane hatred"

Josephine Waters Bennett

"Because of the nature of LEar's internal conflict, his stubborn resistance to the humbling forces unleashed against him", he cannot deliver soliloquies "it is the solution of this problem of how to keep before the audience Lear's guilt and folly that produced the Fool" "because of his unique position he could serve as a chorus representing the voice of wisdom." "he accompanies his mastier to the mad climax of his struggle then is seen no more"

Granville- Barker (On the Fool)

"feeble, fantastic, pathetic, a foil to Lear, a foil to the storm...a piece of court tinsel so drenched and buffeted"

Cheri Y. Halvorson (On Fools)

"Through Feste and LEar's Fool, Shakespeare is truly able to "use the foolish things of the world to confound the wise". The profound wisdom and insight of Feste and Lear's fool enable them to expose the foolish thoughts and deeds of those who inhibit the higher ranks of society"

John Southworth

some of the oldest Eurpoean records describe jesters with the word nebulo. This word carries with it connotations of nothingness or emptiness. The jester "was neither lord nor cleric, freeman nor serf, he existed in social limbo. Even in his natural habitat of the court, he remained apart, almost as if he belonged to another species. It was only in relation to his master that he was able to gain identity"

Victor Bourgy

"there are no fools which resemble Shakespeare's in pre-Shakespearean English drama"

Goldsmith

The artificial fool was permitted to "speak unwelcome truths" and to offer his critique of the play's proceedings, and was therefore "a natural mouthpiece for satire"

John Southworth

In this "assumed folly...we see a reflection of our own foolish attitudes and behaviour"

Cheri Y. Halverson

"Shakespeare was obviously uncomfortable with the idea of the fool returning to his former foolish behaviours once the king regains his right mind. The fact that Lear chose not to have the fool revert to his former status may be an indication of his desire to keep the fool in the realm of the wise"

Friesner

"a good dramatist's effect is the best evidence of his intent"

Cheri Y. Halverson (On the Fool's social status)

"the jester had no social status, and the status of the fool was rather ambiguous; the fact that these characters of questionable rank were used to enlighten their superiors is indeed a social leveler"

Cheri Y. Halverson (On Shakespeare's views)

"Shakespeare's reasons for not using a person of equal rank to set another straight may be an indication of his own opinions about social hierarchy."

Leo Tolstoy

Finds King Lear at every step to be stupid, verbose, unnatural, unintelligible, bombastic, vulgar, tedious and full of incredible events, 'wild ravings', 'mirthless jokes', anachronisms, irrelevancies, obscenities, worn out stage conventions and other faults both moral and aesthetic.

George Orwell

"Lear is not a very good play, as a play It is too drawn out and has too many characters and subplots"

George Orwell (On Edgar)

"Edgar is a superfluous character"

Leo Tolstoy (On the Fool)

"a tedious nuisance"

George Orwell, "the subject of LEar is

renunciation"

George Orwell (On The Fool)

"a trickle of sanity running through the play"

George ORwell (On the Moral of Lear)

"Give away your lands if you want, but don't expect to gain happiness by doing so. Probably you won't gain happiness. If you live for others, you must live for others, and not as a roundabout way of getting an advantage for yourself"

George Orwell (On Shakespeare's views)

"almost never does he put a subversive or skeptical remark in the mouth of a character likely to be identified with himself. Throughout his plays the acute social critics, the people who are not taken in by accepted fallacies, are buffoons, villains, lunatics, or persons who are shamming insanity or in a state of violent hysteria" "[Lear] contains a great deal of veiled social criticism...but is is all uttered by either the Fool, by Edgar when he is pretending to be mad, or by Lear during his bouts of madness...the very fact that Shakespeare used these subterfuges shows how widely his thoughts ranged"

George Orwell (On Shakespeare)

"he loved the surface of the earth and the process of life"

Frank Kermode

"we know we can't count on divine or human justice to intervene in the worst moments of life and what King Lear tries to do is to make us give our real assent to that knowledge"

Frank Kermode (AO4)

Shakespeare's England still entertained the old doctrine of the king's two bodies. One body is identified with his dignity, his inherited and God-given authority, and that body is immortal. But the other body is mortal, and at the funeral it is this body which lies naked in the coffin.

Hannah Arendt - On the banality of evil

referring to Nazi's and other similar situations she described the evil that is practiced by those who simply carry out and augment the horrors that their masters have devised OSWALD

Tony Church on Cordelia

If she had stopped at "Obey you, love you and most honour you" The play could have quite happily stopped there. But she didn't. She chose to attack her sisters - the competitive situation between the two of them has affected her as well

Tony Church - themes

Naked ambition and jealousy appear to ride roughshod over what should be the true relationship between a father and his children, a master and his servants.

Tony Church - AO4

The play is partly a study of the Renaissance man,. embodied in the person of Edmund, who cuts his way through the world by climbing on the shoulders of everybody else.

G.K. Hunter

The play as a whole gives an impression of a monolithic and rough-hewn grander, as if it were some Stonehenge of the mind

Hazlitt

"King Lear is the best of Shakespeare's plays for it is the one in which he was most in earnest"

G.K. Hunter

Characters are all the time learning new and surprising truths, and we in the audience are learning with them. But this is quite different from supposing that the play is about learning a general lesson which can be stated in words other than the author's

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Holinshed's chronicles, Spenser's version of The Faerie Queene that in A Mirror for Magistrates, the old play of King Leir (Shakespeare's main source) all restore Lear and Cordelia to power and happiness

G.K. Hunter (On Shakespeare's addition of madness to the Lear plot)

The pathos of the olf King Leir play is almost wholly swallowed up bin the terrifying maelstrom of words and images that express man's need to see himself as meaningful

G.K. Hunter (On the lack of dialogue in the Heath scenes)

They have become voices rather than people, bound together by he orchestration of the scene rather than anything that might be called social contact or individual expression

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Since my young lady's going into France sir, the Fool hath much pined away - This certainly indicates an intention to make fragility one of the Fool's main characteristics, but literally it says no more than that the Fool feels keenly the pressures of the new world of Goneril and Regan

Hunter on the Fool

He is a living manifestation of that world of irony and metaphor in which every experience can throw light on every other one

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Shakespeare had been reading about possession (or pretended possession) in the 1603 anti-papist pamphlet Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures

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Poor Tom is in the thrall of his obsessions, cold, hunger, lice and other incommodities, which he expresses as the local effects of the 'foul fiend', but which we (like Lear), may see as the basic features of unprotected humanity. In these terms we are all in danger of possession.

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It is he (Lear) who directs our attention to circle round and round the obsessive centres of need, nature and kind and the idea of identity. These of course, are key ideas in sanity as well

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The madness is a bursting apart of the coherence which keeps the hundred thousand flaws in connected sequenceLear asserts, in his sanity, that he cannot tell who he is, for the defining family relationship is denied by his daughters. In the mad scenes it is not only the relationship between man and his family which he finds denied; it is the whole sequence of loyalties , duties and respects that everywhere in Shakespeare describes the final good.

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If humankind cannot satisfy the individual's need for a sense of himself, how then is man different from beast? The re4lationship between man and beast, the potential for beastiality in man, is constantly referred to by the imagery. Man wears clothes it is true, But he need not. Even the beggar's rags are superfluous

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The boundary seperating his innder world from the outer reality of things seems to dissolve...As the two worlds begin to dissolve into each other, it is the external world of duties and continuities, opf business and homes and clothing that loses its shape. Its elements are reformed as part of an infernal Bosch like landscape...THE WHIRLPOOLS OF HIS OBSESSION DREDGE UP TRUTHS THAT ARE NORMALLY CONCEALED

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The madness, I have suggested, translates the story into a mode of vision absent from the other versions

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The history of King Lear belongs to the sequence that Geoffrey of monmouth invented to bridge the gap between Aeneas and the coming of the Romans to Britain. It is presented as a history but it is a fabulous history, closer to folk legend than to politics and acceptable as a part ofthe English royal story only because of the extreme remoteness of the time in which it was set.

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His art is usually quite happy to be anachronistic, and we must assume that his pains were designed to secure more than the establishment of Lear's antiquity. H seems to have wished to explore, with almost scientific thoroughness, the problem of Providence in a context which does not exact a Christian answer

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He raises the largest questions of man's relationship to destiny and leaves them unanswered, hanging like a dark cloud over the play

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Nature: seet around this word are opposed and historically differentiated views of its meaning. For Gloucester as for Lear, the 'bias of nature' requires children and parents to love and protect one another; the offices of nature cause the young to respect the old, the subordinates to yield to the superior, the passionate to bow to the rational, as female to male or human top divine. All this follows inevitably from an assumption that nature is a reflection of the status quo....In Shakspeare's own day the noise of challenge to this view of nature was not hard to hear. In Thomas Milles's A Treasury of Ancient and Modern Times 1613 argues that bastards are more worthy to be esteemed than the lawfully born since they are begot in more heat and vigour of love...than most legitimate children.

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Tha anarchic individual points to his own nature as wilful and wayward, owing no natural alligiance to the system and he points also at the system itself, noting that the status quop is not held together by love and loyalty, but by force and fraud.

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Edmund stands for a whole class of anti-Establishment individualists, who, in every age are thought to be finding it too easy to pull down the decencies of society

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The revolution fails, not for an absence of power in the revolutionaries, but because its aims are (as in Kant's definition of evil) incapable of being universalized

I was contracted to them both. All three now marry in an instant

This strange moment of concert is the most concerted that the three have been able to achieve. It was easy for them to exploit and destroy the system they belonged to; but they proved quite incapable of building another one.

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The story that Shakespeare inherited showed the swing back to virtue at the end as an inevitable function of an unbreached moral system. In Shakespeare, the system with which the play began is, in effect, destroyed. The scything swing of assumptions threoughout the play leaves the end desolated, hesitant, minimal, more certain of what has been lost than what can survive

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The paralleling of betrayals by a favoured child and rescue by one outcast and persecuted, direct our attention away from the particularities of either story and fasten it on a more general image of a world where betrayal and monstrous ingratitude are customary laws.

A.C. Bradley

The number of essential characters is so large, their actions and movements so complicated, and the events towards the end crowd each other so thickly that the reader's attention is overstrained.

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Shakespeare's vision in this play seems to have required a vagueness about place, a broadening and flattening of action and character. The reader's attention is meant to be prized loose from individual motives and actions...Our attention is also meant to be detached from any sense of implausibility in the speed of the plot development

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When Nahum Tate referred to the play as a heap of jewels unstrung he was of course referrng to the play's lack of linear connexion. Albany's change of heart, the double love of the sisters for edmund, the King of France's love for Cordelia, Cornwall's death - all these come quite unprepared, as if being shown in pools of light surrounded by darkness

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The metaphors that the characters use are not commonly chosen to represent their personal vocabulary or delineate their natures> They are more like trains of gunpowder laid across the play, capable of expolding into action when the poet requires it e.g. The blionding of Gloucester or Lear's tearing off of his clothes - the climactic moment when narrative and language coalesce, giving the narrative event a force and density it could not have in another telling

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At the beginning of a play we can see that Cordelia's nothing is important, but we are unsure what it means.We have to learn that both Lear and Gloucester begin with an assurance that nothing is the empty end of the scale, far away from themselves and we see the process of the play bringing them to nothing

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Levi Strauss interprets myth in terms not only og its narrative (or dichronous) linear dimension but also of its recurrent (or synchronous) thematic elements and finds meaning only by the relationship of these two.

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Lear is the medieval sovereign with two bodies, one merely personal and one belonging to the role. He proposes to divide them and in his own natural body 'Unburdened crawl towards death'

Marshall McLuhan

the whole ritual is fake. The first words of the play tell us the land is already divided. MM has pointed out that the map denotes a degree of abstraction from the real land and marks the separation of business from ritual.

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The wide skirted meads make explicit what is implied by the whole transaction, that the land is seen as a kind of extension from the physical life of the royal family. Its fertility is closely associated with Goneril's own fertility. Fertility appears to be the form of the good....Lear sees himself as giving out life force. The punishment of Kent and Cordelia is that they should be cut off from his life giving beams

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The continuity with which Lear calls on the Gods to underwrite his role not as the arbiter of life and death but as the guarantor of fertility marks its cental importance. In LEar's view it seems to be the power to promote or deny issue that holds his world together

Price me at her worth. In my true heart I find she names my very deed of love

the two sisters are alike in their concern for the metallic and legalistic aspects of the exchange, a statement traded for land, and more abstractly, power.

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All three are united in rejecting the combination of roles that Lear prepares for them, the equation of power and love, of rule with natural fertility

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The play seems intent on hunting down the man who thinks he knows what he believes or even who he is

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Cordelia returns like a second Eve intent to 'Lop overgrown, or prune or prop or bind' to recover the human garden from its natural rankness and promote proper order

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The last Act of King Lear is studded with references to the last judgement, including the final chaos of the reign of the antichrist

FRank Kermode

In King Lear everything tends towards a conclusion which does not occur...The world may, as Gloucester supposes, exibit all the symptoms of decay and change, all the terrors of an approaching end, but when the end comes, it is not the end, and both suffering and the need for patience are perpetual

Hunter on Edmund

The only trajectory has been the self-defeating circle of his own individuality; the world has not moved for him

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a play where the loss of identity is almost a prerequisite for survival