King Lear Flashcards
Critics:
William R. Elton
The last act shatters the foundations of faith itself… the play is not a drama of meaningful suffereing and redemption within a just universe ruled by providential higher powers… its ironical structure is just calculated to destroy faith in both poetic justice and divine justice
Critics:
Paul W. Kahn
Edmund is the most dangerous and trecherous of the characters. Yet, he begins from a cause that we cannot identify as unjust. By placing himself ahead of his brother, he is only rejecting the fate that the law had dealt him. If there is no justicee in Edmund’s plan, there is no justice in Edgar’s legal entitlement either.
Critics:
Michael Ignatieff:
[The heath is] what the human world would be like if pity, duty, customs of honour and due ceased to rule human behaviour. It is both a real place and a place in the mind. It is a realm of natural man beyond society, clothes, retinue, pride and respect. Lear learns of natural man’s terrible identity at degree zerp, and the equality of abjection no man can endure.
Critics:
Coppelia Kahn:
The play’s beginning is marked by the omnipotent presence of the father and absence of the mother. Yet in Lear’s scheme from parceling out his kingdom, we can discern a child’s image of being mothered. He wants control over those closest to him and to be absolutely dependent on them.
Critics:
Harley Granville- Barker
It will be a fatal error to present Cordelia as a meek saint, She has more than a touch of her father in her. She is as proud as he is, and as obsitnate, for all her sweetness and her youth.
Critics:
Joseph Warton:
it is too savage and shocking
Naham Tate’s 1681 adaptation of King Lear:
-eliminaated the character of the fool and the blinding of Gloucester; Tate created a happy ending for the story by marrying Cordelia and Edgar and restoring Lear to the throne
In the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) 2007 production of King Lear:
- Lear is a semi-religious, childish, dominant and narcissitic figure.
- Lear punches kent instead of drawing his sword- appearing more bestial, impulsive and disgraceful- he does’nt refer to his kingly power
-Edmund within earshot of Gloucester and Kent’s conversation (where Gloucester calls Edmund a whoreson)- Edmund’s actions more justified?
-Set roughly in the 18th century. Anachronistic- more historically/ culturally relevent? - daughters- goneril and reagan seem nervous before there speech- suggesting that they are carefully crafting their words, trying to impress and Cordelia leans over Lear to speak- appealing more hostile, intimidating and assertive and reaches for Lear’s crown- wanting poer, desire to preserve monarchy
Critics:
David Scott Kastan:
‘Tragedy for Shakespeare , is the genre of uncompensated suffering’
Critics:
O’Toole:
the overwhelming sense of injustice.. is the whole point of the play’s structure
Critics: norris- sisters
the horror of Lear’s story is the unnatural nehavious of Goneril and Regan
Critics:
Frank Kermode 1: the blinding scene …
[the blinding scene] restores the mood of despair and horror
Critics:
Frank Kermode 2: two …
two bodies of the King, one loves by ceremony… The other is born naked… Lear is stripped
Critics:
Maynard Mack:
madness has a further dimension as insight
Critics:
Adrian Scarborough: the fool…
[the fool is a] faintly ridiculous and ludicrous part.
Critics:
Carol Rutter: most complicatedly..
most complicatedly feminised of all Shakespeare’s tragedies
Critics:
Carol Rutter 2: women ..
women curse. They curse because they cannot act
Critics:
Stanley Cavell: regan’s mind ..
[Regan’s] mind itself is a lynch mob
Critics:
Adrian Scarborough 2: the fool is in a …
[the Fool] is in a pretty powerful position
Critics:
George Orwell: the fool is a …
[the Fool is] a trickle of sanity
Critics:
Carol Rutter: lavished …
lavished upon the broken body of this redemptive child
Critics:
Frank Kermode 3: on Gloucetser and Edmund
folly of Gloucester and ingenious unregenerate wickedness of Edmund
Critics:
O’Toole 2: two endings
the ending of the play is in a sense a second ending.
Critics:
O’Toole 3: the story bursts …
the story bursts out beyond the moral ending of the play, the overwhelming sense of injustice breaks through the even balancing of good and evil