King Lear Critical Readings

Question 1

Kastan

Answer 1

Shakespeares tragedies evoke questions of pain and suffering the play so agonisingly portrays, in refusal to give any answers Shakespeare presents any meaning or value to human suffering

Question 2

Nuttal

Answer 2

Tensions of the pleasure of tragedy
“The pleasure of tragedy is immediately a uncomfortable phrase”
“If people go again and again to see such things, they must in some way enjoy them”

Question 3

A.C. Bradley

Answer 3

No play at the end of which the hero remains alive is, in the full Shakespearean sense, a tragedy

Question 4

Mack

Answer 4

Madness is to some degree a punishment or doom, corresponding to the adage

Question 5

Rutter

Answer 5

Patriarchal anxieties about effeminization are played out with a vengeance in this most complicatedly feminised of all Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Question 6

Rutter - Lear’s command his daughters should speak, put against cultural practice, the audiences expedition that good women keep their mouth shut

(Link a quote to this by Rutter also)

Answer 6

Lear’s elder daughters neither weep nor curse. They do not need to.
Having learned his language to survive his love test, they now assume the male voice, the male space Lear abandons.

Question 7

O’Tootle

Answer 7

The overwhelming sense of injustice breaks through even balancing of good and evil. And this isn’t a failure of the play : it is the whole point of the plays structure

Question 8

Simon Schama - this is England

Answer 8

Are kings capable of humanity or do they leave it behind when they ascend the throne?

Question 9

Simon Schama - the hollow crown

Answer 9

“Only when his power has been stripped away can Lear understand the human condition. He is on a torturing road to understanding.”