King Lear A05

Fintin O’Toole

‘‘Duty and bonds are values of a feudal society … How much is a basic question of a capitalist one.’’

Jonathan Dollimore

King lear is really a play about power , property and inheritance

Marxist reading

Kiernan Ryan 

‘‘ Carapace of kingship cracks open to reveal a nascent nameless being who does not recognise himself as King Lear.’’

William Epsom

‘Anytime Lear prays to the gods, or anuome else prays on his behalf , there are bad effects immediatly’

Samuel Johnson 

Every scene adding to the ‘aggravation of distress’

Samuel Johnson

the tragic conclusion seems ‘contrary to the natural ideas of justice’

Samuel Johnson

·       ‘I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor’

John Middleton Murray

·       Described it as ‘uncontrollable despair’

Caroline Spurgeon

‘in anguished movement, tugged, wrenched, beaten, pierced, stung, scourged, dislocated, flayed, gashed, scalded, tortured and finally broken on the rack.’

Frank Kermode

• ·       finds the play to be Shakespeare’s ‘cruellest’.

Professor Simon palfrey

The world of King Lear is a liminal world: it's in between human and non-human, living ind dead, ends and beginnings.

Dr Laurence Coupe

THE GREEN WORLD

‘An important role ascribed to nature which is associated with magical transformation’

‘ the condition of humanity after the fall from the garden caused by Adam and Eves defiance of gods order. This is depicted in shakespeares tragedies.’

Ian Mcewan - Duke of York production

Rain on Lear throughout the whole storm scene

John Lewis -stempel

‘Shakespeare brings us to the door of the monden age … he too worried about what humans were beginning to do to the environment

Lisa Hopkins

‘He wants to present us with an anti pastoral landscape’

Lisa Hopkins (2)

‘ the play can be seen effectively as

Daniel belt on charrier

Critic

Lear is a king like preacher and the audience are his congregation

Jean howard on the storm

Some of the most beautiful lines in the play

Jean howard on the storm

Lear here sees the storm not as something affecting only him or that he can control , but something that everyone experiences and the poor more terribly than anyone else

Jean Howard on the storm 

The imperitves in his peech become directed at himself not at the heavens or the storm 

Bruce R smith

Lear in bearing his flesh is discovering not an underlying animality but his full humanity 

Grace Ioppolo

Barest most brutal discussions on philosophy

Grace Ioppolo

Strongest sense of Shakespeares philosphy

Sam mendes (DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL THEATRE PRODUCTION)

‘The play is about the stripping away of home , rank and status , sanity; what it means to have nothing , magnified all the more because these are people who have had everything’

A.C BRADLEY (on Edgar/poor tom)

‘ The most religious person in the play’

Simon Palfrey (ON EDGAR )

‘ A stoic philospher’

Simon palfrey (on edgar, longer quote)

‘a formidable shapeshifter’

Kieran Ryan

‘Gloucesters blinding dislocated him from the culture that has shaped his assumptions and values’

Critic

‘He comments on the limitless nature of human suffering’

Aristotle

Tradagies must have so much suffering that it should almost be beyond what humans can reasonably endure so that they can achieve pathos and eventually reach catharsis

Critic (ALBANY)

‘He is always too late , so often a bystander. Albany is out of his depth in the world of King Lear.’

Percy Shelly

‘The most perfect specimen of dramatic art in the world’ - Talking about the play itself

Simon Palfrey

‘ The end of each line in a precipice; the words stop, the eyes look over , the head swoons. It is fearful to stand still. The line-ending phrases take us to the verge of fear. Each one enacts a dizzying vertigo.’

Luke Walters

‘The audience is cheated by Edgar and also, by extenstion , Shakespeare. His words would have been the plays reality for the blinded Gloucester and the audience. In a moment of complete dramatic empathy, we become Gloucester: the audience is positioned just as he is, on the edge of a cliff.’ 

Jan Kott

‘ Lear is ridiculous, naive and stupid.’

McLuskie sees the play…

‘Fundamentally misogynistic and as a paradigm for the sexual politics of the genre (tragedy)’

McLuskie argues that…

‘Renaissance tragedy is misogynistic.’

Kahn argues that…

‘Misogyny is instructive in the play.’

Kahn argues the play is an exploration of …

‘ Male anxiety in a historical account of the way feelings are apparently feminine.’

John Lennard

“By the end almost everyone is dead or broken”

James Shapiro & Trevor Nunn

“ Those going to see Shakespeare’s Lear would have most likely had a passing acquaintance with the old Leir (published in 1605), so it’s remarkable what Shakespeare does with their expectations.’

Jennifer Wallace

“ The ending of King Lear is most powerfully disturbing.”

William R. Elton

“ The last act shatters the foundations of faith itself.”

Micheal Ignatieff

“ The play is about the intimate violence of family life.”

Andrew Hadfield

“ King Lear (…) must sureley be ready in terms of the danger of a monarch cutting himself from the people he rules.’