Final Flashcards
“Nothing” in King Lear
Nothing is defined by an absence and negation. Is a vortex that disrupts order in the world. Reduces Lear to nakedness, madness. Blinds Gloucester. Erases difference between Edgar (legitimate) and Edmund (bastard). Repetition of nothing questions everything. Conflates “no” and “know” aurally.
Broadcasting insecurity: Lear is left with nothing (loses daughters, wealth, kingdom). Entire play offers an extended example of “nothing will come from nothing”.
Filius nullius
Means someone with no legal rights because of illegitimate birth. The child of no one.
Hysterica passio
Term for suffocation of the womb (a female disease). Lear’s self-diagnoses suggests humoral imbalance and madness. Wandering womb microcosm symbolizes his connection to his children is lost). Lear constructs the womb as a sickness. He Appropriates womb to highlight maternal role to daughters (loss of maternal, ghost of the maternal).
(Lack of) mothers
Lear’s identification with mother suggests womb offers privileged connection to children. Conflates maternal with generative, nurturing, forgiving. Show extreme form of masculine controlled world. Cost of repressing femininity. Absent mother in Shakespeare canon.
Fool in tragedy
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Edgar/Poor Tom
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Cliff epiode significance
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Pity and fear
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Tate’s Lear
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Gendered death
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Rome vs. Egypt
Rome: Reason, Discipline, Duty, Honesty, Phallic, Cool and organized landscape, Caesar.
Egypt: Passion, Pleasure, Love, Theatricality, Yonic, Lush and decadent land, Cleopatra.
Strategic opacity
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Love in Antony & Cleopatra
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Homosocial
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A&C genre
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