Critical approaches to Lear Flashcards
Loss of meaning and purpose, destruction of identity
“a contradiction at the very core of the linguistic animal which makes it ‘natural’ for signs to come adrift from things” (Eagleton)
Tragedy and sin is formed from action
“innocence is merely the absence of action” (Russo)
Unconscious blindness presented in Lear
“blindness to everything but the dictates of his passions or affections, that produces all his misfortunes” (Hazlitt)
“even when facing death, their capacity of self eloquent, self-delusion is undiminished”
Loss of repentance or the second chance
“repentance is not enough… no easy evasion of responsibility” (Peat)
Theatrical allusion, the deception and capacity of theatre
“we suspend our disbelief under the power of theatre”
“Shakespeare seems to have created a world too cruel and unmerciful to be true to life” (Jacobs)
Sufferance of society
“the collision of powers, involving the whole of society, in which no one is at fault but all suffer.” (Hegel)
Apollonian and Dionysian beliefs
‘with all its beauty and moderation, was based on a veil substratum of suffering’
‘excess was revealed as truth, contradiction; the bliss born of pain, spoke from the heart of nature’ (Neitzsche)
The conditions in which a sense of resolve is found in despair
“Man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be” (Camus)
The absolute nature of Lear’s rule
“a monarch who was totally absolute, dispensing a natural or divine law to his subjects” (Knafla)
“kings… even by God himself they are called Gods” (James I)
Inevitable tragedy of the King- Divine right of kings
“the higher we are placed, the greater shall our fall be” (James I)
“as the wheel inevitably continued to turn” (Trussler)
Question of identity and the torment of existence
“how should we best rule ourselves?” (Worrall)
“nothing needs to be seen in the context of a play in which language strains to find words to express the pain of being” (Kermode)
The attempt to re-form a broken society
“characters struggle unsuccessfully to reconstruct a coherent worldview from the ruins of the old” (Kastan)
Uprising of the the daughters, rejection of the familial
“having learned his language… they now assume the male voice, the male space Lear abandons” (Rutter)
The purging of oneself in the act of madness
“the expulsion of the unclean, the improper, the alien or simply the excessive” (Poole)
The silent power of the feminine
“I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman but I have the heart and stomach of a king” (Elizabeth I)
