Critical Quotes Flashcards
James Shapiro
“The play offers a condemning view of political and social relations”
Janet Dillon
“Before Lear ruptures the bond between father and daughter, he has already ruptured the bond between the Monarch and his people”
“One bind linked to another, and each individual rupture takes its place with a more widespread destruction”
“Both families in the play mix children loyal to their binds and those who delight in breaking them”
“The gods themselves seem absent from any of the events”
Kordecki
“The young wish to move away from their fathers methods of ‘governing by intimidation’”
Cheri Y Halvorson
"The profound insight of Feste and Lear's fool enable them to expose the foolish thoughts and deeds of those who inhabit the higher ranks of society" "Shakespeare uses being that his world deems lowly and foolish to destabilise conventional wisdom about class and subvert the hierarchal expectations of his culture"
A.C Bradley
“The stage I the test of strictly dramatic quality, and King Lear is too huge for the stage”
“We are unconscious to the grotesqueness of the incident for common sense” - refering to Gloucester’s suicide attempt
“The blinding of Gloucester on the stage has been condemned almost universally; and surely with justice”
S.L Goldberg
“For some people, Cordelis is wholly in the right; for others she is not; for most, however, she is more in the right than Lear”
“There is no supernatural justice, only human natural justice”
“The play does not offer us anything like a single, straightforward,clear cut attitude to life”
Heilman
“The suffering in tragedy is not an end but a product and a means”
“His suffering leads to death, and it raises questions for the audience about social systems and the nature of human beings”
Johnson
“It is a play in which the wicked prosper and the virtuous miscarry”
“It is debatable who the”wicked” and the “virtuous” are”
Frank Kermode
“Shakespeare concerns himself with the contrast between the two bodies of the King; one which is distinguished by regalia which set him above nature. The other is born naked, subject to pain and disease”
“There is something appalling about the thought of an author who will submit his characters and his audience to such a test” - referring to Gloucester’s blinding
LC Knights
“The play is a microcosm of the human race”
“The first sentence of the play suggests Lear is guilty of bias… His suffering is provisionally seen to be related to injustice of his own”
“Lear’s final discovery is his need for Cordelia’s love”
Marilyn French/Linda Bamber
Often compare women in the play to the stereotype of the Puritan good wife.
Kathleen McLuskie
Sees the play as fundamentally misogynistic and a paradigm for the social politics of its genre and history
Shakespeare aligns anarchy and sexual insubordination. Through Gonoril and Regan
Coppélia Kahn
Misogyny is instrumental and instructive. Lear progresses from rejection of womanly values to a final acceptance of his more womanly qualities
Lear is an exploration of male anxiety in a historical account of the way feelings are apparently feminine
Psychoanalytical readings of the play suggest that Lear has a desire to be mothered by Cordelia
Sir Trevor Nunn
“Shakespeare’s play is an investigation into the extremes of human behaviour, an enquiry into the nature of man”
“Lear clearly sees himself as a conduit of the gods”
Link between Lear and Sonnet 66
