King Lear Critical Readings

Question 1

Boethius

Answer 1

‘Tragedy means a literary composition written in happier times recalling events that ended in misery’

Question 2

David Scott Kastan ‘…the idea…’

Answer 2

‘…the idea of tragedy is to fall from prosperity to wretchedness’

Question 3

David Scott Kastan ‘…in its very simplicity…’

Answer 3

‘…in its very simplicity, it calls attention to tragedy’s power, making it universal and inexplicable’

Question 4

Frank Kermode

Answer 4

‘We know we can’t count on divine human justice to intervene in the worst moment of life and what King Lear tries to do is to make us give our real assent to that knowledge’

Question 5

J. Dover Willson

Answer 5

‘To Edmund…‘Nature’ is a force encouraging the individual to think only of his own desires…even if that involves him in trampling others…’

Question 6

Lamar

Answer 6

The aim of the main plot is the ‘Education and purification of Lear’

Question 7

Dunn

Answer 7

‘Ingratitude is crucial to the interpretation of the storm metaphor. It is that evil which breaks the heart of Lear and shatters his reason’

Question 8

Dollimore ‘for the humanist…’

Answer 8

‘For the humanist the tragic paradox arises here: debasement gives rise to dignity and at the moment when Lear might be expected to be most brutalised he becomes most human’

Question 9

Arnold Kettle

Answer 9

‘Lear’s madness is not such a breakdown as a breakthrough, it is necessary’

Question 10

Dollimore ‘a play about…’

Answer 10

King Lear is “a play about power, property and inheritance…a catastrophic redistribution of power and property - and, eventually, a civil war - disclose the awful truth that [in capitalist society] these two things are somehow prior to the laws of human kindness and not vice-versa.”

Question 11

Jon Danby

Answer 11

‘King Lear can be regarded as a play dramatising the meaning of the single word ‘Nature’…two main meanings, strongly contrasted and mutually exclusive run through the play. On the one side is the view adopted by Edmund, Goneril and Regan. On the other is the view largely held by the Lear party.’

Question 12

G. Wilson Knight

Answer 12

‘[Edmund] repudiates and rejects ‘custom, civilisation’. He obeys nature’s law of selfishness.’

Question 13

G. K. Hunter

Answer 13

‘The two sisters are alike in their concern for the metallic and legalistic aspects of the exchange, a statement traded for land, and more abstractly, power’

Question 14

Thomas P. Roach

Answer 14

En of the play - “as bleak and unrewarding as man can reach outside the gates of hell”

Question 15

Jan Kott on the fool

Answer 15

“the only true madness is to regard the world as rational”

Question 16

Jorgensen

Answer 16

“Lear is still pathetically unwise in worldly matters at the end of the play” but none of this matters because “he has learned that which, especially for a dying man, is all important”

Question 17

Tony Church

Answer 17

“the balance of sympathy tends to be partly with the two elder daughters because of the position in which Lear has put them”

Question 18

McLuskie

Answer 18

‘The play is ultimately anti-feminist, and cannot be read but as an endorsement of the necessity for male power over the disruptive female desires which have brought about the tragedy’