Critical Readings

McLuskie - Feminist

Play as ‘fundamentally misogynistic’ and also a ‘paradigm for the sexual politics of the tragic genre and Jacobean era’

‘Tragedy is misogynistic

‘Shakespeare aligns anarchy and sexual insubordination via Gonerill and Regan’

‘the sister’s villainy is a plot device; their mocking pleasure at Cordelia’s downfall a comic act and their evil is an exciting plot twist on Lear’s life’

‘all female resistance is defined by gender, sexuality and position in the family; family relations are fixed and any move against them is portrayed as a destructive move against the rightful order’

Kahn

‘charts Lear’s progress from misogynist rejection of womanly values to a final acceptance of his more womanly qualities

‘Psychoanalytical reading of the play suggests Lear’s desire to be mothered by Cordelia’

‘Perhaps Lear deliberately manipulates giving away of Cordelia; incestuous purpose’

‘Lear as a child, wants absolute power over those closest to him and to be absolutely dependant on him, pre oedipal experience/desire’

‘As a man, father, ruler, habitual needs for love have been repressed’ wants to crawl like a baby towards death’

‘re-enacts childish rage about the absence of a mother figure’

Tate’s version

Fool removed, Cordelia and Edgar fall in love, Lear restored, recovers sanity, succeeded by Cordelia

Foakes

‘for Edgar and Albany the overwhelming events of the play have freed them to speak feelingly so that they will not need to suffer in order to see properly’

O’Toole

‘It is not just that the older generation of Lear and Gloucester has been decimated, but that the younger generation, to whom the future should be entrusted, has suffered even worse’

‘It is not just the good with whom we sympathised, but also the evil, whose youthful energy was a highly attractive contrast to the decrepit, clapped-out atmosphere of old age’

Lennard

‘At the end of King Lear Edgar can offer only platitudes heavy with defeat.’

Shapiro and Nunn

‘[Shakespeare] violated that fundamental rule of drama that plays serve as a moral or cautionary influence on us, because they show, regardless of the trials and vicissitudes, that the good will triumph by the end of the story.’

Wallace

‘Ultimately the questions which the tragic heroes raise during the course of the play are too profound and transgressive to allow for a strong conclusion in which we can believe. In this respect, the ending of King Lear is most powerfully disturbing.’

Greer

‘The play has two strands:…optimism, the belief that there is a providence in the fall of a great man as in the fall of a sparrow; the other, the strand of rage against the ‘dying of the light.’

Elton

‘structure is just calculated to destroy faith in both poetic justice and divine justice.’

Roche

‘Shakespeare is a profoundly Christian writer, and I think that King Lear, based as it is on historical sources, is meant to depict the plight of man before the Christian era, that is, before the salvation of man by Christ’s sacrifice was available.’ 

Spurgeon

‘In this play we are conscious all through of ... a human body in anguished movement, tugged, wrenched, beaten, pierced, stung, scourged, dislocated, flayed, gashed, scalded, tortured, and finally broken on the rack.’

Stampfer

‘The denouement itself, with the gratuitous, harrowing deaths of Cordelia and Lear, controverts any justice in the universe. Chance kills despite the stars.’

‘In a palsied cosmos, orphan man must either live by the moral law, which is the bond of love, or swiftly destroy himself. To this paradox, too, Shakespeare offers no mitigation in King Lear. The human condition is as inescapable as it is unendurable.’

Ignatieff

‘...the play is about the intimate violence of family life’

Sisson

‘The idea upon which the play rests is indeed the consequence of a grave error and abuse of justice by the king within whose powers justice lies.’ 

Hadfield

‘the danger of a monarch cutting himself off from the people he rules, and so destroying what he has so carefully built up. The play does not represent a king who is ineffective or unimpressive, but one who has not taken enough care of his kingdom.’ 

A.C Bradley

Folio end of the play reveals Lear dying ‘in an agony of ecstasy…an unbearable joy’, early 20^th century reading of ecstatic closure

Jan Kott

‘King Lear makes a tragic mockery of both Christian and secular theodicies…and of the rational view of history…All that remains at the end of this gigantic pantomime is the earth – empty and bleeding.’

The situation the characters of Edgar and Gloucester find themselves in is tragic, yet the portrayal of these events makes them look like clowns, subverting the Shakespearean norm of clowns imitating kings.

Dollimore

Lear and Cordelia’s deaths as subversive

‘sabotaging the prospect of both closure and recuperation’

Empathetic Imagination

‘In a moment of complete dramatic empathy, we become Gloucester.’

The scene at Dover cliff is ‘a microcosmic moment where the playwright distils the play's vision into a brief speech’.

Neill

‘A servant-less master is equated to nothing’

Edgar - Connell Guide

We can question whether his ‘slick manipulation of roles - so many personae, so many voices, such multivalent concealment on such a grand scale - are as much indicative of a ready liar and deciever, of personal and moral insincerity, even emptiness, as it is of a commendable capacity for useful part-playing and role-switching?

Frye

‘An amoral world, to which Edmund aheres, is natural’

Leggatt

Nature in King Lear has both destructive and beneficient aspects (reflect the doubleness of humanity, correspondence between great nature and human nature)