King Lear AO5

Critical interpretations of William Shakespeare's 'King Lear'

Heilman (on suffering)

“The suffering in tragedy is not an end but a product and a means”

Muir (on Lear’s madness)

“Precisely because he is mad Lear is freed from the conventional attitudes of society”

Muir (on Shakespeare’s portrayal of madness)

“Shakespeare is clinically accurate in his presentations of the symptoms of madness”

Muir (on Lear’s attacks of society)

“Attacks of society, however profound they may seem, are the result of his mental derangement”

Lamb (on age)

“To see an old man tottering about on stage ... is painful and disgusting”

Brandes (on Cordelia)

(Cordelia is) “the living emblem of womanly dignity”

Kahn (on Lear’s madness)

“Lear's breakdown occurs when he refuses to accept that he is dependent on his daughters”

Asimov (on the Fool)

“The great secret of the Fool is that he is no fool at all”

Gibson (on justice)

“Justice is a major theme in King Lear”

Johnson (on the play)

“The wicked prosper”

Bucknill (on Lear’s madness)

(The division of the kingdom is) “the first act of Lear’s developing insanity”

Watts (on sight and blindness)

“The theme of blindness is part of a wider theme of 'wisdom gained through suffering’”

Kahn (on control)

(Lear) “wants two mutually exclusive things at once: to have absolute control over those closest to him and to be absolutely dependent on them”

Mendes (on the events of the play)

“Two aspects of the play run concurrently: the breakdown of the family and the breakdown of the nation.”

Kott (on the world)

"King Lear is a play about the disintegration of the world"

McLuskie (on family)

"Family relations in this play are seen as fixed and determined, and any movement within them is portrayed as a destructive reversal of rightful order" 

Bloom (on Lear’s love test)

“The prime consequence of such love is only devastation”

Goldberg (on divine intervention)

“There is no supernatural justice - only human natural justice”

Kozintsev (on the play)

“Of all Shakespeare's tragedies, ‘King Lear’ is the darkest and most spiritually profound”

Elyot (on order)

"Without order may be nothing stable or permanent"

Hazlitt (on Lear’s misfortune)

“It is Lear's blindness to everything but the dictates of his passions or affections, that produces all his misfortunes”

Muir (on flattery)

“Lear had been flattered so long that he was no longer capable of distinguishing between the genuine and the false”

McLuskie (on femininity)

“Lear is an anti-feminine play. It shows female self-assertion and sexual desire as a source of evil and male control of society as natural”

Collington (on Cordelia)

(Cordelia) “slices through the thin veneer concealing her father’s essential fragility, vulnerability, and dependence”

O’Mahoney (on Goneril and Regan)

“Sycophantic, greedy, jealous and cruel, Goneril and Regan do everything in their power to destroy their father, sister and ultimately each other”

O’Mahoney (on the divine consequences of Goneril’s suicide)

“Suicide was perceived as a divine judgement because the perpetrator was believed to go straight to hell”

Kettle (on Gloucester’s blinding)

(Gloucester is) “hideously punished for his moral laxity and political blindness”

Traub (on order)

“A well-ordered household was supposed to run like a well-ordered state”

Pritchard (on Shakespeare’s use of illegitimacy)

“Shakespeare uses illegitimacy as a motif to expose the pitfalls in common law”

Knight (on good and evil)

“Good is natural, evil unnatural to human nature”

Bradley (on Edmund)

(Edmund sees people) “merely as hindrances or helps to his end”

Bruce (on Edmund)

“Edmund … appeals to a meritocratic ideal”

Aebischer (on Gloucester’s blinding)

“The audience … is made to feel complicit in the violence perpetrated”

Abrams (on tragic heroes)

“An Aristotelian tragic hero experiences events that inspire ‘pity and fear’ in the audience”

Bate & Rasmussen (on Lear)

“Lear’s downward trajectory begins when he artificially splits and divides both his country and his children”

Stuart (on Lear)

“Lear would rather have flattery than the truth”

Videbaek (on the Fool)

(The Fool) “shows deep compassion and understanding of the human condition”

Erasmus (on Lear and the Fool)

“They are, paradoxically, both insiders and outsiders in society”

Knight (on Edmund)

“His birth symbolises his condition”

Dowden (on the consequences of Lear’s madness)

"There is a breaking of the bonds of nature and society all around us”