Critics Flashcards
Tolstoy
‘The subject of the play is renunciation… only the wilfully blind can fail to understand what Shakespeare is saying’
Knights
‘Lear’s final discovery is of his need for Cordelia’s love’
Clemen
‘They have no relationship to nature, to the elemental powers. Their world is the world of reason; they live and speak within the narrow limits of their plans… Lear’s language continually points beyond these limits’
Kermode
‘The love he seeks is not the sort that can be offered in formal or subservient expression, and he therefore rejects the love of Cordelia and Kent’
Spencer
‘Before the purgatorial heath scenes, Lear argues with Goneril that man’s life is distinguished from beast’s by just such privileges as having a superfluous number of retainers… Yet linked to this insistence is the blind indifference to the sufferings of others who lack the bare necessities of life’
Freud
‘She [Cordelia] is the Death-Goddess, who… bids the old man renounce love, choose death, and make friends with the necessity of dying’
Michel de Montaigne, 1580
‘a father overburdened by years… ought willingly to distribute his wealth… amongst those, to whom by natural degree they belong’
Irving
‘it is fitting that Edmund should be a bastard for, conceived outside of God’s harmonious order, he can deny all benevolent human feelings’
Granville-Barker
‘Edgar is a Christian gentleman in a pagan play’
Schwhen
‘again and again, Gloucester blesses him, but Edgar does not hear’
Schwhen
‘when Lear in his ‘madness’ first encounters Edgar as Tom O’Bedlam, he recognises him for what he is, a ‘man of justice’’
Schwhen
‘His [Edgar’s] father would ‘say that he had eyes again’ if only he could see Edgar in his touch… He is thereby implicated in Gloucester’s continuing blindness’
Schwhen
‘King Lear simply cannot be in any strong sense a ‘Christian’ play, for charity neither redeems the world, nor does it even save its only clear embodiment: Cordelia’
Kelly
‘family ruptures in this play cannot be divorced from the chaos within the body of the state’
Kelly
Her [Cordelia’s] response to the conflict between filial and marital obligations is literally to display what Goneril verbally offers, as ‘[a] love that makes breath poor and speech unable’’
